According to Gartner the market for what it calls virtual personal assistant (VPA-)enabled wireless speakers is set to to boom from $360 million in 2015 to $2.1 billion in 2020, with 3.3% of households adopting such a speaker by 2020.

"Last year, the VPA speaker market essentially consisted of end-user spending focused entirely on Amazon Echo, a wireless speaker with an array of embedded microphones to capture and respond to users' far-field voice commands for Amazon's VPA-- Alexa. Later, Amazon introduced the Tap and Echo Dot," the analyst says. "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."

VPA speakers, especially wall-powered ones, allow for customers to own and install multiple devices around the home. The value of such speakers comes from ease of use and the intuitive means of interaction, and if all household members recognise such value it will drive the desire for terminal access throughout the entire house, and not just one room.

In other words? A "significant" amount of households might have more than one VPA-enabled speaker, or maybe even one per room. In fact, Gartner predicts 75% of households with VPAs to have one, 20% to have two and 5% to have three or more by 2020. Further driving adoption are smaller price factors, price erosion, potential subsidisation models and improved speech-to-text technology.

One can expect the VPAs of 2020 to have satisfying natural-language interaction, allowing for adoption in commercial applications, further driving sales.

"The widespread adoption and proliferation of VPA speakers could result in a significant number of online shopping orders in the home being initiated from a VPA speaker, rather than a laptop or mobile device," Gartner concludes. "Vendors that are able to create an intimate, familiar relationship with the user will be able to contextualise ordering to the extent that preferred products will be proposed, and processing details will already be captured. As a result, the user's propensity to purchase products and services using VPA systems should increase, transactional friction could be reduced and the overall user experience would be improved.

Go Gartner Says WW Spending on VPA-Enabled Wireless Speakers Will Top $2 Billion by 2020