According to ABI Research, smart home technology pushed into 34 million new homes worldwide last year. In North America, the most valuable smart home market, close to 40% of households have invested in smart home technology. However, new home growth is expected to decline slightly this year as the market transitions from entering new homes to extending the scope of existing deployments.
"The leading smart home markets, including North America, are already seeing new smart home adoption slowing down," said Jonathan Collins, research director at ABI. "The explosion in smart home investment in the past few years aimed at building a captive smart home user base means manufacturers and service providers face pivoting to deliver offerings that can be integrated into existing smart homes or to deliver pricing and services that can entice smart home users to ditch their existing investments."
Voice control is key to ongoing smart home integration, ABI says. Voice control front-ends, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, are the vanguard device in many new smart homes, and interoperability with the platforms that support them is vital for device OEMs and service providers.
This year, smart home voice control devices are expected to represent one of every three smart home devices sold. Driven by strong voice control shipments, total smart home device shipments revenue is expected to grow at 16% CAGR between 2019 and 2024 to reach $24.3 billion worldwide.
However, the smart home market is both driven and challenged by the rise of smart home voice control.
"Amazon and Google in North America and Europe along with players including Tencent and Alibaba in the Asia Pacific are building large installed bases, increasingly putting them in a powerful position to determine the direction and value of smart home interoperability," said Collins.
The millions of homes where voice control has gained a foothold for smart home adoption are expected to be fertile ground for the wider adoption of a growing range of additional smart home devices, control systems, integrated applications, and vendors.
"How the smart home market understands and engages with this potential, driven by voice control, will shape the market to come," Collins said.