Smart Speakers Expected To Be More Popular Than Wearables This Year

Without a doubt smart speakers is the tech industry’s latest trend, where we’re seeing digital assistants such as Google Assistant and Siri move into devices that aren’t smartphones. In fact smart speakers appear to be so popular to the point where some have forecasted that they may very well overtake wearables in popularity this year.

This is according to eMarketer’s latest forecast obtained by Business Insider. According to the forecast, they predict that the number of US smart speaker users will rise at a compound annual growth rate of 47.9% between 2016 and 2020, meaning we’re looking at an increase of 16 million to 76.5 million.

At the start of the year, a study found that one in six Americans owned a smart speaker, so it’s not surprising to think that there could be more in the future. Amazon already pretty much dominates the smart speaker market, thanks to them being first to the market with a variety of offerings.

Google isn’t lagging behind too much as it was recently reported that the company had overtaken Amazon in smart speaker shipments for Q1 2018. Apple is still very much behind the competition due to being late and also due to their smart speaker offering being priced much higher, although we have heard that the company could try to salvage that with a cheaper Beats-branded Siri speaker that could be announced at WWDC 2018.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Audio, Gadgets, Home
Tags: Connected Objects, Fitness, IoT (Internet of Things), Smartwatch, Speakers, Wearable Tech