Amazon Unveils Next Generation Echo Show 8, All-New Echo Hub, and New Echo Frames

Remember smart speakers? Apparently Amazon doesn't want to. At that time of the year when traditionally Amazon would introduce the latest models of its Echo smart speakers, this year the company only announced a new smart display, the next generation Echo Show 8 with an upgraded processor, spatial audio, and a built-in smart home hub. And for those who don't even want the speaker, Amazon introduced a new Echo Hub, a smart home control panel. Amazon did expand on the audio glasses category, with two ugly frames that are said to have a long-lasting battery.

Covestro returns to CES in 2022 to showcase the endless possibilities of sustainable materials and smart surfaces, including a new demonstration device jointly developed with TactoTek. The polymer materials experts at Covestro have been working with the pioneer of in-mold structural electronics (IMSE) solutions, to create the Nighthawk demonstrator with integrated display, which utilizes Makrolon resin and Makrofol films from Covestro.

Market research firm Parks Associates released its latest Consumer Insights Dashboard, a new ongoing service that analyzes the firm's quarterly surveys of 10,000 US broadband households to track consumer adoption of home devices and services. Its Consumer Electronics Dashboard reveals that among the most commonly adopted CE device categories, smart TVs and smart speakers/displays showed significant growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Smart TVs reached 56%, while smart speakers/displays reached 53%.

The smart speaker market in the second quarter of 2021 surged to new heights as consumers and brands adapt to the ongoing pandemic, according to the latest research from Strategy Analytics. Even with the looming specters of supply chain challenges, component shortages, and the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus hanging over the market, global shipments of smart speakers and smart displays in Q2 2021 grew 34.8% from Q2 2020 to 39.5 million units, a record for a second calendar quarter.

New research from Parks Associates reveals a strong correlation between smart speaker and smart home device ownership — 60% of smart speaker owners and/or smart display owners own at least one smart home device, versus 34% of US broadband households overall. The firm's new research, Smart Speaker and Smart Display Market Assessment, identifies key market drivers and barriers in this product category and assesses growth in the smart speaker and display market via topline market forecasts.

With a slightly more conservative forecast than some published reports from other market research firms, Canalys expects the global smart speaker market, including smart displays, to reach 163 million units in 2021, characterized as a growth of 21%. In 2020, Mainland China, which has the COVID-19 pandemic relatively under control, will lead, growing 16%, while the rest of the global market is expected to grow 3% as countries continue to battle the coronavirus.

Google announced it is scaling back Android Things as a general-purpose IoT platform. Android Things will now focus solely on OEM-built smart speakers and displays. Google is discontinuing public access to i.MX8M, Snapdragon, and MediaTek based production modules for the OS. The ARM-based production boards from Innocomm, Intrinsyc, and MediaTek that Google was reselling to vendors with pre-loaded Android Things will no longer be publicly supported.

According to a new report from Strategy Analytics, worldwide sales of smart displays, a sub segment of the wider smart speaker market, will grow 111% in 2019 to reach 16.9 million units. The report forecasts that more than 12 million homes will own a smart display by the end of this year, rising to nearly 100 million homes by 2023. The report also predicts that 46% of unit sales of smart displays in 2019 will have built-in support for Google Assistant while a further 40% will support Amazon’s Alexa platform. Chinese platforms including Baidu’s DuerOS will account for the majority of the remaining 14% of the market.