According to a new report from ABI Research, voice control will play an increasingly important role in the management of smart home devices moving forward. In fact, the research firm estimates that more than 120 million voice-enabled devices will ship annually by 2021 as the technology becomes a key user interface within the connected home environment.
“Led by the success of Amazon’s Alexa platform, smart home voice control is creating new competition and demands for wireless speaker and other vendors to include voice capabilities in their devices,” Jonathan Collins, research director at ABI Research, said in a statement “But the scaling of voice control applications in the smart home breeds complexity. Vendors will need to evaluate how and when to bring voice control into smart home devices in order to best tackle adding the service into wider smart home systems.”
ABI said that new microphone-enhanced products, such as cameras, doorbells, smart lighting solutions and others, will extend the ability to hear voice commands throughout the modern smart home. In fact, the research firm pointed out that a number of vendors, such as Google with its Nest learning thermostat, are already expanding their products to support listening capabilities.
However, tying multiple listening and voice controlled devices together into a coherent smart home system will require a shared voice platform, according to ABI. Devoid of any standardization thus far, ABI said that each of the primary home voice platform providers—Apple, Amazon, and Google—all have their own approaches and ways of leveraging their voice capabilities to extend and support their core businesses.
“As more devices support voice control, new voice platforms will increasingly aim to support device and device and service providers,” Collins added. “In the past few months, for example, Viv Labs emerged as a company focused solely on extending its voice platform to as many services and devices as possible—without tying it to a sub-strategy of boosting the appeal of a separate core business.”
Click here for more information about ABI Research’s Voice Integration and Control in the Smart Home report.
