• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, April 28, 2020

As consumer usage of voice assistants continues to skyrocket, the companies behind those assistants look for business models to monetize all that voice.

Consumers will interact with voice assistants on 8.4 billion devices by 2024, according to a new study by Juniper Research.

That would be growth of 113% compared to the 4.2 billion devices expected to be in use by the end of this year.

The fastest growth is in connected TV-based voice assistants, as the assistants become a standard feature. About half (49%) of connected TV voice assistants are projected to be in use in 2024.

So far, the money has been in hardware, such as with sales of Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home lines of products.

Many queries to voice assistants comprise voice searches for information, products or services.

The challenge is that consumers want access to all voice assistants from all devices.

While Alexa is good at shopping, Google Assistant specializes in knowledge and Siri owns the iPhone, platform owners are struggling to determine their exact business model, according to Juniper.

“There are increasing efforts being made by many retailers to make their products easier to find and order across digital assistants’ platforms, with voice being a key element,” states the study.

“However, this locks retailers into a specific digital assistant provider’s ecosystem, narrowing the overall number of voice commerce channels. It also means that digital assistants that cannot perform cross-platform integration will inevitably lose partners as they will be unable to sustain a customer presence across the whole customer journey.”

While the industry sorts this out, consumers will increasingly be speaking to things.