Global shipments of smart speakers and other voice-activated smart home devices by brand vendors are expected to double in 2018 from 2017, drastically driving up demand for related chipsets and allowing IC designers to enjoy booming orders from Apple and other tech giants, according to industry sources.

Apple officially launched its first-generation smart speaker HomePod in February 2018, with sales not as good as expected so far. But global web giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent are ready to release their new-generation smart speakers and smart home devices with enhanced voice-interface functions in the second half of the year to cash in on the traditional boom season for electronics products, the sources said.

Among Taiwan IC designers, MediaTek was the largest winner in the global smart speaker chip market in 2017, and is expected to remain so in 2018, as Amazon, Google and Alibaba are among its customers while Apple and Tencent are also reportedly interested in building partnerships with the company, the sources indicated.

The sources revealed that MediaTek's new-generation smart speaker chip platform boasts more powerful computing performance, more stable network connectivity, and lower power consumption than older ones.

MediaTek is expected to see its 2018 shipments of smart speaker chipsets surge over 50% on year, maintaining a global market share at over 50% for the year.

Meanwhile, many other Taiwan IC designers are also aggressively proceeding with related deployments to benefit from brisk demand for chips from the smart speaker market. Realtek Semiconductor and Richwave are developing Wi-Fi ad RF (radio frequency) chips, RafaelMirco's Bluetook 5.0 chipset solutions are paired with Nuvoton Technology's MCU chips to meet customer needs, and ZillTek Technology is stepping up development of MEMS microphone chips, all seeking to tap huge business opportunities in the market.

IC designers said that voice interface will become the mainstream human-machine interface, as such interface will serve to integrate major killer applications of cloud services, big data, AI and IoT.

They continued that with smart speakers serving as an important testing stone for voice interface, global providers of web services, software developers, and brand vendors of consumer devices are all rushing to jump on the bandwagon, so as to deepen their presence in the global market for smart voice-assistant devices.

Industry sources estimated annual shipments of smart speakers and other voice-interfaced devices at over 100 million units, available with clear market segmentation of high-, mid and low-tier devices.

By: DocMemory
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