Last year had been great for tech giants, and almost every company made a good profit by offering innovative products and technologies. We saw a significant boost in their hardware sales chart also. What is more interesting is that a big chunk of that profit comes from the smart speakers.
We
earlier mentioned the popular trend of having smart speakers in the USA and other countries; a Singapore based analysis firm, Canalys has put a seal on that and reported that this trend will continue in 2018 too. Yes, the smart speaker adoption will be on boost over the AR, VR or other such technologies.
Source: canalys.com
The Research Analyst at Canalys, Lucio Chen says,
“2018 will be the defining year for smart speaker adoption. Smart speaker uptake has grown faster than any other consumer technology. Smart speakers in 2018 will move beyond hardware, with strategic attempts to monetize the growing installed base in the US and beyond. The possibilities to do this are endless, be it discreet advertising, content subscription bundles, premium services or enterprise solutions. The technology is still in transition, and increased investments from multiple players of the ecosystem will fuel growth.”
You can read the full report of this forecast
here, however, following is the key take away.
- Globally, over 56.3 million shipments of smart speakers will take place in 2018.
- Amazon and Google will remain the biggest players in the market with Echo and Home products respectively.
- The US will be the biggest smart speaker market until 2020, with expected 38.4 million units sold in 2018, followed by China with 4.4 million units.
- More partnerships and innovations, as well as useful upgrades, will be the key element for attracting more consumers, such as Alexa’s multiple smart home integrations and Google’s partnership with Nest.
- New vendors (like Apple with its Homekit) will enter the market which will boost the consumers’ interest in smart speaker market.
- In China, Amazon and Google will not be able to spread the magic because of service restrictions. Instead, local vendors like Alibaba, JD.com, and Xiaomi will have the pleasure to entertain Chinese market.
What we see here is that AI is going to build the next generation. The increased competition and integration of highly innovative AI has made the smart-speaker market worth analyzing and keeping a tab on.