In the infancy of the smart speaker market in 2016, the total number of smart speaker units sold was less than 10 million, however, at the beginning of the latter half of 2017, Amazon Echo had sold more than 20 million devices alone (source: voicebot.ai) and it is predicted (source:voicebot.ai) that, during 2018, more than 56 million smart speaker devices will be sold:
Figure 7.7: Growth of smart speaker market
Also, by 2020, it is predicted (source: Gartner, Edison Research 2017) that 75% of US households will have a smart speaker:
Figure 7.8: Consumer adoption of smart speakers
The preceding statistics predict a market poised to grow exponentially and explode over the coming years. Also, the pitching in of Google and Apple with their own voice-computing devices only consolidates this fact.
No doubt, this is the best time to develop for voice since the technology, the hardware, and the documentation are both easily available and accessible.