Last week, Amazon announced a raft of new products that leverage the Alexa service. I have Alexa devices all throughout my house (and even a Rova Viva in my car), and also have a number of Apple devices with Siri. So naturally, as I went through the Phenomena data, I was on the lookout for how both of those devices — as well as Google Home — were moving up the resource utilization charts as the devices proliferate throughout fixed and mobile networks.

If you were hoping for a clear winner in the ongoing battle, I am afraid you will be disappointed.  The "traffic share" for the two voice assistants at the moment is a dead heat:

A future edition of the Phenomena report will break this down for fixed and mobile networks (where I think we can all guess which will dominate on each network type), as this report is for the combined traffic throughout all fixed, mobile, WiFi, and satellite networks that Sandvine is deployed on. 

I was also a bit curious — if the two systems were that close in connections, what were their upstream traffic share? From a network point of view, an operator might want to understand what traffic an average Alexa or Siri query generates, so as the number of devices that support the assistants grow, they can forecast the impact on their network. 

That bit of data led me to investigate a bit more — how much was an average session for both? Siri, as indicated by the rankings, uses more, with about 17x more data per upstream session than Alexa. That is a statistically significant difference, and we'll keep an eye on that in the future.

The question probably in your mind is "where is Google Home?" It is in the data, but much further down the line: it ranks for less than 0.01% of all connections at 448th and less than 0.01% of upstream bandwidth at 1108th. Interestingly enough, Google's per connection usage is slightly higher than Alexa, but not by much, so that specific statistic bears watching as Google Home increases its traffic share.

If you are interested in the data, please register for one of our two October 2nd webinars, where we will reveal all the data and release the report.

10 a.m. Eastern US Time

9 p.m. Eastern US Time

Previous Phenomena Previews

Global Internet Phenomena Preview #1: Ookla Speedtest
Global Internet Phenomena Preview #2: Crashlytics
Global Internet Phenomena Preview #3: PlayStation vs. Xbox Live vs. Steam
Global Internet Phenomena Preview #4: File sharing