The smart home will achieve significant penetration and widespread adoption among consumers, but the rate and speed of adoption are dependent on many factors. As connectivity in the home increases year-over-year, smart home players have a chance to capitalize on and push the smart home forward. No single company holds the future in its grasp.

And, despite the promising future and the smart home’s remarkable potential, there is still a disconnect between market hype and actual consumer behavior. Many consumers familiar with smart home products are uncertain about pricing, providers, capabilities, and benefits, indicating the need for more aggressive marketing and consumer education.

Common barriers to smart home adoption have included interoperability, solutions lacking clear value propositions, high upfront costs, battery life limitations, difficult installation, and security/privacy concerns. 36% of consumers who set up smart home devices on their own experience difficulty. Many of these issues will be resolved with emerging technologies that address these barriers, opening the gate to broader adoption in the near term.

Voice control, data analytics, machine learning, sound recognition, and artificial intelligence play a substantial role in simplifying, streamlining, and automating the smart home, radically enhancing the value proposition by providing context, awareness, and decision-making that moves the market beyond scripted, pre-programmed automation scenes. Integration between core smart home entryway and living room products and emerging ones in the kitchen, garage, and bedrooms are increasingly feasible.

Video and audio analytics provide the eyes and ears for the smart home, enabling new ways to provide value. In addition, as connectivity is being extended to numerous product categories, smart home solution providers must understand the opportunity for integration with a broader range of solutions in and around the home.

The future smart home will not be dominated by one player, but by many. Companies can take an early head start by leading the implementation of AI to predictive and personalized automation. Certainly, tech giants like Amazon and Google have a leg up in the competition given the vast resources available. However, tech giants will face an uphill challenge convincing consumers of the safety and security of their personal data, as both companies collect troves of user data that is often used for ad targeting and other unauthorized actions.

The connected home is evolving into a large ecosystem with many connected devices and services that sometimes collaborate for convenient, entertaining, or otherwise valuable use cases. Technology advancements show promise of development towards a true smart home concept, where a home’s collection of connected products work seamlessly together and automate tasks for end-users by learning their tendencies to provide a whole new level of convenience and value.

Parks Associates has studied the connected home market for almost four decades. We help companies with business intelligence, consumer data, market forecasts, and marketing activities. Thanks for reading our research. We welcome all feedback and comments.

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