That, however, did not pan out as expected. A rake of privacy scandals certainly didn’t help and, despite Alexa getting roughly a billion user interactions per week in 2018, they were mostly simple requests to play music or deliver a weather report. Not exactly the kind of asks that can easily be monetized. That year, it lost almost $5 billion. Business Insider claims Alexa is the third most popular voice assistant with 71.6 million users, behind Apple’s Siri (77.6 million users) and Google Assistant (81.5 million users). What’s notable about this is that Siri and Google Assistant come pre-installed on smartphones, while Alexa is primarily available on dedicated smart speakers. To get by in modern society, you kind of need a smartphone—but nobody needs a smart speaker. Google is seemingly in a similar situation with Google Assistant—it apparently does not generate significant revenue for the company. According to a recent report from The Information, the search giant will invest less in making it available on non-Google (and non-smartphone) hardware. Strangely, Apple’s much maligned Siri could be the most successful of the voice assistants—or at least the one that is causing its parent company the smallest headache. The reason could be that it’s a shared component across the iPhone-Mac-Apple Watch ecosystem, not a standalone product. But Apple also has its own separate Siri-supported smart home hardware. The original $350 HomePod smart speaker was a commercial failure, though the $99 HomePod Mini seems to be doing much better—and was the top-selling smart speaker in quarter one of this year. There are apparently plans to relaunch a full-size HomePod. Especially when you consider Apple’s prices and usual margins, it’s fairly safe to assume these devices aren’t being sold at cost price.
