Google has been pushing sales of its Google Home devices to more markets and has also incorporated Google Assistant into the smart speaker as it is gearing up efforts to compete against Amazon in the smart home market, according to Digitimes Research.
Google announced recently that it will make its Google Home smart speaker series available in seven more markets in 2018 compared to the availability of Amazon's lineup of Echo speakers in at least 36 countries. However, Google's plans to enable Google Assistant to support up to 30 languages, leveraging its deep research in multi-language and semantic, by year-end 2018, will make Google Home a strong contender to Echo, which supports only three language via Alexa.
Google is also actively soliciting cooperation from hardware manufacturers, not only to enrich the product portfolio supporting Google Assistant, but also aim to simplify user's operation processes for smart household appliances, or efficiently integrate support for smart products, while also addressing the security issue faced by IoT devices currently.
Digitimes Research believes that more market-niche applications such as medical and smart healthcare are likely to emerge as smart home devices have continued to evolve to become mainstream. Granted that the need for smart healthcare may eventually spur up demand for smart home devices, and single-person households are also likely to increase the purchase of smart home products, the smart home device market is expected to grow exponentially in 2018.