Global smart speaker shipments total 19.7 million units in Q3 2018, Canalys reports-- a 137% Y-o-Y increase over Q3 2017 shipments of 8.3m, and well in line with the Canalys forecast of 75m for the whole of 2018.
Following the initial wave of smart speaker adoption, vendors are rapidly changing marketing strategies to target different user groups. For instance, college and university students are key music streaming service consumers, making easy targets for Amazon and Google through back-to-school deals. Vendors are also building on the theme of home automation and IoT by positioning smart speakers as central hubs, but they still face a key issue in lowering the technical barriers to adoption.