Can Echo Finally Break Through in Home Automation?

For all its apparent success with its Echo smart speakers, Amazon continues to seek to build the business, finding more new customers and new uses. We’ve long tracked the share of Echo US sales, and more recently updated our analysis of how owners use them (reminder: mostly to play music, a critical but basic use case).

There’s another way for Amazon to grow the business: occupy more rooms in the home. Over the years, Amazon has expanded the Echo line to include models that are tailored to certain use cases and certain rooms - like small screen models for bedside, large screen models for kitchens, high quality speakers for living rooms and dens, and small, inexpensive models for everywhere. We see efforts to get Echos into multiple rooms in Amazon’s promotions, where they sold multiple device packages of the least expensive models in the early days, and aggressively discount a variety of models regularly throughout the year. 

Amazon clearly has room to go in pursuing this strategy. Nine years in, most Amazon Echo owners still have only one device. In the most recent twelve-month period, 69% of US Echo owners have one, and about one-quarter have two or three (Chart 1).