Talk to Me: Investigating the Traffic Characteristics of Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home

The application area of smart speakers is steadily increasing with the Amazon Echo family and Google Home being brand leaders. Use cases include, among others, updating the calendar, home automation, or simply assisting users in their every day life. With the increasing amount of devices, the traffic generation and requesting process becomes a relevant subject to be studied in order to create traffic models and predict the impact on networks by these types of devices. Furthermore, with a detailed understanding of the devices, service quality can be monitored and improved for the end user. For that reason, in this work the requesting and traffic generation process of the Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home are studied and the generated network load of both devices is compared. With the insights of this study and additional device usage statistics, detailed traffic and usage models can be created.