It seems like everyone and their brother want to get into the growing smart speaker market, a market that is expected to grow to $5.5 billion by 2022. We’ve seen Amazon dominate with their Echo devices and Google trying to challenge that with Google Home. We’ve heard rumors about others as well like Microsoft, Samsung, and even online retail giant Alibaba, who are exploring their own products. Now the latest is that Facebook is also now in the planning (and testing) stages of their very own smart speaker.
But sources are saying that instead of harping on the voice recognition functionality that most of the current ones in the market are pushing, this one will focus on image display and will have a 15-inch touch panel. Now we’re not really sure how that would work in a smart speaker if display is the priority, but it would be interesting to see how they will go beyond just having a device to look at your Facebook timeline.
The smart speaker will reportedly have an LG Display and will use in-cell technology and its chassis will be magnesium-aluminum-alloy. It will be manufactured by Pegatron Technology and in fact, rumor is that they have already started creating small volumes of the device in their China plants. The design is supposedly created by Facebook’s very own Building 8 department.
Strategy Analytics reported that shipments of smart speakers reached 5.9 million units in 2016 but majority of that, 4.2 million to be somewhat exact, were shipped in the fourth quarter of that year. So the growth potential is large, but it’s still too early to say if this is just a fad or if it’s the next big thing in electronics.
VIA: Digitimes
