Smart Speakers Featuring Displays a Growing Trend According to Strategy Analytics

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.

Following earlier demonstrations at CES 2018, Qualcomm introduced a series of new platforms, SoC and development kits targeting new advanced audio applications and smart speakers, including the support of key wireless technologies, voice and cloud ecosystems. Solutions include its Smart Audio Platform optimized for smart speakers, a 6-microphone far field voice platform qualified for Amazon AVS, Dolby Audio implementations for wireless speakers and much more.

Baidu, a company known as China's search engine is investing heavily in its own voice engine, artificial intelligence (AI), and even hardware technologies, following Google's footsteps. Earlier this year, Baidu acquired Raven, a Beijing-based smart home startup, and the first results of that investment have now been revealed with two voice-activated speakers that run on the company's own AI platform. The design was the result of a cooperation with a Swedish start-up, Teenage Engineering.