Smart Speaker War!
Sonos announces earnings and talks patent lawsuit - while eMarketer releases report that says smart speaker sales are not meeting projections
Sonos announced their earnings today, and the market responded by lifting their stock 10%. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence made a few TV appearances (linked below) where he talked about their challenges in the smart speaker market. Spence was asked a bunch of questions about their patent lawsuit, and it’s worth watching both these videos to listen to his point of view. One thing I learned that I didn’t know was they had previously defended their patents against Denon successfully.
With their acquisition of Snips last November, I expect them to continue to roll out interesting voice features for their new microphone-enabled features. The “Hey Sonos” assistant has got to be coming out soon, which reinforces our opinion there is no scenario where a home doesn’t have multiple voice assistants. I’m pulling for Sonos and hope they can push the envelope with innovative features for their passionate customer base. I’d love to talk to them about adding voice to their mobile app, in case they wanted their legacy users to use voice control through their mobile app. I can’t help the plug, sorry. 😁
Sonos CEO: Market is underestimating the smart speaker war - Yahoo Finance
‘I’m not going to sit idly by’ — Sonos CEO on suing Google over patent infringement- CNBC
So while there might be smart speaker “war” raging on the feature and patent front, according to eMarketer smart speakers are not meeting sales expectations.
Haven’t dug into the whole report yet, but it looks like we’re starting to get firmer numbers on sales and usage than we’ve previously had. Check it out below:
Purchases Via Smart Speakers Are Not Taking Off - eMarketer
Smart speaker shopping falls short of projections - Retail Dive
Other things to check out:
Voiceflow releases new features - this is slick!
This is issue #6 of SpokeDaily, a daily round of #voicefirst reads that Spokestack is talking about today. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or hit us up on Twitter!
Thanks for reading! And if you need a voice for your app, email me.