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In 2011, Apple released Siri, inaugurating the era of the digital assistant. Three years later, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) brought out the Echo smart speaker featuring Alexa, and it wasn't long before Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) jumped on board with Google Assistant and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) with Cortana. Today, the home voice assistant has become a fixture in roughly 120 million homes.
There's no doubt that the technology has grown very quickly from a novelty to a ubiquitous component of the modern household, yet none of the major companies involved -- Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Google -- has managed to finesse a revenue model for their smart speakers, even if the benefits to each company's core business seem clear enough. Although it's difficult to verify, none of the devices seem to be turning a profit yet. There's little data on the sales of specific devices, though a study conducted last year by market researcher Arizton found that $1.3 billion smart speakers were sold in 2017. It further suggested that the majority of those sales were made at a loss.