BUSINESS: Research + Stats Smart Speakers (of the House) By Staff Thursday, November 8, 2018 3:16 PM Smart speakers and their voice recognition capabilities and interoperability with connected devices provide consumers a simple and affordable way to create a smart home.According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are surging in popularity. Following tremendous growth of 279 percent in 2017, CTA forecasts that more than 43 million smart speakers will ship in 2018, accounting for roughly $3.8 billion in wholesale revenue. CTA’s latest consumer tracker study indicates that nearly one in four (24 percent) U.S. households owns a smart speaker. By the end of 2019, a majority of U.S. households will own a smart speaker, marking one of the fastest adoption rates for a consumer technology product. This translates into record interest for products ranging from door locks to dishwashers, and double digit growth for most smart home products in 2018.Smart speakers are especially popular with millennials. This year, 24.9 million U.S. millennials—or more than a third of the millennial population—will use a smart speaker, a 38.3 percent increase from 2017, according to eMarketer estimates."Older millennials are more likely than younger millennials to use the speaker because they have their own households and have the funds to purchase the device," said eMarketer forecasting analyst Jaimie Chung.Being the most tech-savvy age group, they use the speaker for all of its functionalities—as a smart home hub, to play music from their streaming accounts or to order an Uber.And because they are early adopters, millennials are patient with the technology when it may not fully understand their queries.Overall, it comes down to convenience. "Millennials spend the most time with screens, and the speaker allows for a screen- and hands-free option for all of the basic tasks that they rely on devices for in their day-to-day life," Chung said.