Will Google Home Hub ever become a useful local search tool?

Smart speakers have boomed in popularity. Amazon recently reported that its Echo Dot was the best selling product globally during “cyber weekend.” We don’t yet know how smart displays are doing, though Google’s Home Hub has probably sold well. According to a product listing on eBay, the Google Home Hub is the top-selling product in its smart speakers category.

Not realized as a marketing channel. Though smart speakers have been widely adopted and lots of Americans own them, that hasn’t translated into all the promised marketing use cases — at least so far. People are using them to listen to music, check the weather, turn off lights; but I don’t see these devices driving much search volume. (Nobody has revealed search volume data for these devices.)

Early surveys about smart speaker usage seemed to suggest that large percentages of people were already doing local searches on smart speakers. Research from Edison Research and NPR reported, for example, that 36 percent of survey respondents had looked up restaurants or local businesses using a smart speaker. If that’s true, it’s unlikely to be a persistent, recurring behavior.

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