Android founder's startup has a smart home play (GOOGL)

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Essential, Android founder Andy Rubin's mobile-focused startup, unveiled a smart speaker on Tuesday known as Home alongside a handful of other products, reports The Verge.

Powered by Essential's new Ambient OS, Home can control smart home devices, answer basic questions, stream music, and set timers. It can also take action without being prompted, like issuing appointment reminders. The device will reportedly ship later this summer, according to Wired, but pricing information hasn't yet been released.

The company is betting its eventually large ecosystem and unique qualities will help it gain users as the smart home market grows. BI Intelligence forecasts that 73 million smart devices will be installed in US households by 2023, marking steady growth in the smart home market. That could create opportunities for companies like Essential, which likely hopes that features like unprompted actions could attract users, especially in an increasingly crowded space. And Ambient OS is open-source, which could lead to more devices coming to market quickly, strengthening the ecosystem.

But other dominant players make it unlikely that Essential will be able to carve out a large market share. Amazon and Google own the smart speaker market — Echo alone is in 9 million households, for example. And they're beginning to make ecosystem plays — by offering third-party integration, working to move into the car, and building a presence on consumers' mobile devices, for example. In addition, though neither Amazon nor Google has brought unprompted functionality to market yet, it's on the way for both. That means that Essential is probably not special enough to get a majority of users to abandon their existing platforms. On top of that, consumers pursuing smart home devices for the first time might be more willing to adopt a familiar name like Amazon or Google, to which they already have loyalty, than a smaller, lesser known party. That could pave a challenging path for Essential if it wants to get competitive quickly.

The US smart home market has still yet to meet the expectations many observers had in the early part of this decade.

The same issues BI Intelligence first identified back in 2015 still plague the space — persistently high prices, technological fragmentation, and consumers' lack of a perceived benefit from the devices.

But the newfound popularity of smart home voice control has revolutionized smart home ecosystems across the country, and convinces more consumers to equip their homes with smart devices on a daily basis. The Amazon Echo, released in 2014, has become immensely popular and capable, awakening users to the utility of both voice control and smart home devices. This has prompted companies to rush to release competing devices and integrate voice control into their smart home ecosystems.

Nicholas Shields, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that examines the overall state of the US smart home market — both the professionally and self-installed markets. It also analyzes the factors driving demand for smart home devices and smart home voice speakers, and discusses the future of voice control in the home.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Voice control is becoming a key remote interface within the home, a trend that began with the introduction of the Amazon Echo in 2014. Since then, Google, Samsung, and Apple have all integrated voice control into their smart home ecosystems.
• While progress has been made, prices are still too high and consumers still have yet to show strong demand for smart home devices.
• The US smart home market is only now entering the mass market phase of consumer adoption and overcoming the chasm that it sat in back in 2015.

In full, the report:

• Analyzes current consumer demand for smart home devices based off results from BI Intelligence's proprietary survey.
• Forecasts future growth in the number of smart home devices installed in American homes.
• Analyzes the factors influencing the proliferation of voice control devices in the homes.
• Identifies and analyzes the market strategies of various companies that have integrated voice control into their smart home ecosystems.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
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