Welcoming attendees to its 21st annual Connections: The Premier Connected Home Conference, which begins today in San Francisco, Parks is forecasting U.S. consumers will buy more than 2.3 billion connected devices between 2015 and 2020, and those consumers "are showing strong preferences for voice as the interface for their devices. Companies in the smart-home, entertainment and connected-car ecosystems are pursuing partnerships that can add voice control to a variety of solutions in the connected home. Voice control is the top trend for 2017 in the IoT and smart home and a main focus of discussion at Connections," said Elizabeth Parks, senior VP.

The new IoT forecasts were presented during the pre-show research workshops, with Parks analysts demonstrating that over 442 million connected consumer devices will be sold in the U.S. in 2020. These sales totals include connected entertainment, mobile, health and smart-home devices. Personal assistant devices, which include speakers with voice control such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, are the fastest growing category, with a compound annual growth rate of 78.3 percent between 2015 and 2020.

From the article "Smart Speakers Are Driving Smart-Home Growth" by John Laposky.