The growth driver this year will be the new models being released by various vendors ahead of the festive shopping season. Be that as it may, growth is still expected to remain relatively subdued this year, but the market is expected to emerge stronger in 2021, thanks to a more broad-based recovery worldwide. Beyond the immediate future, Canalys says that it expects the global smart speaker market to reach 640 million by 2024. There is, however, a bit if a caveat to that forecast, because the the smart assistant ecosystem needs to be supported by third-party developers, hardware vendors, and service providers for the market to become mainstream. According to Low: “It is crucial for ecosystem partners to pay close attention to what platform vendors achieve, while having a keen sense to uncover new use cases as users shift habits amid the ongoing pandemic”.
