Spending on VPA-enabled wireless speakers to hit $2.1 bn by 2020: Gartner

The market for Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA)-enabled wireless speakers will reach $2.1 billion by 2020 -- up from $360 million in 2015, market research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

By 2020, 3.3 per cent of global households are forecast to have adopted a VPA-enabled wireless speaker.

VPA speakers, especially those that are wall-powered, allow for multiple devices to be owned by a household and installed in a home.

"With smaller form factors, price erosion and potential subsidisation models, we expect that 75 per cent of households with VPAs will have one, 20 per cent will have two, and five per cent will have three or more devices by 2020," said Werner Goertz, Research Director at Gartner.

Today's VPAs are limited in vocabulary and contextualisation but these will improve in the future.

Gartner expected that by 2020, a natural-language interaction could be delivered that satisfies users and creates scenarios with significantly improved value.

Consequently, adoption of VPA interaction, especially in commercial applications, will occur and drive unit sales for VPA speakers.

"By 2020, competitors' products and third-party implementations of leading VPAs (Google Assistant, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana) will likely have ramped up," added Goertz.

--IANS

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