Live from CES: CTA’s Shawn Dubravac on Trends to Watch at CES 2017 and Beyond

Tomorrow morning the largest CES ever, with more than 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space and more than 155,000 attendees will begin in earnest and Shawn Dubravac, chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) laid out some of the top trends to watch at the show and beyond. And in a more diverse consumer technology marketplace the definition of what is a hit product needs to change.

Shawn Dubravac of CTA says that voice recognition will transform the consumer experience.

“We’re not looking for the blockbuster product like the TV which is the super star of technology as the average home has three of them and they are in 90% of all homes,” says Dubravac. “We are in a more fragmented consumer technology environment and 20-30% ownership rates are sustainable market rates. Not everything needs to be compared to TV, smartphones, or computers.”

Topping the list is what Dubravac says is the next computer interface: voice. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa Platform and Google’s Home are the most well-known of the current voice control interfaces and the improvements in the past three years in terms of accuracy (climbing from approximately 23% to 94%) have opened a whole new era of control of not only small dedicated devices (like Amazon Echo and Google Home) but the integration of those technologies into countless other devices.

“We expect to see wide deployment of voice and a progression of how it can be used in a more nuanced way,” says Dubravac. “This ushers in an era of faceless computing where voice control will be integrated into TV sets and use it to control the TV experience.”

He also expects it to continue to offer more complex functionality like finding a specific scene within a movie or sports event. The ability for a viewer to say “Alexa, show me all of the touchdowns” or “Alexa show me all of the stolen bases today in Major League Baseball” opens a new era of metadata utilization and even metadata creation via voice commands.

“Vocal computing will replace the traditional GUI for robots and other emerging applications,” he says. “Voice clearly is in a crossover area where it moves from the theoretical to the practical and people start thinking about how it can be used if it was just a little bit better.”

Dubravac expects that more than 700 Alex platform applications within consumer devices will be launched here at CES, which leads to another trend: artificial intelligence. The fluidity of conversation recognition between a human user and a device continues to grow and allow for artificial intelligence to seamlessly improve. And it also allows for that artificial intelligence to be spread instantaneously across millions of other devices.

The use of voice controlled consumer devices coupled with artificial intelligence opens a whole realm of consumer experiences and takes the concept of the “smart home” to the next level.

“Refrigerators will be able to adjust to their environment and sense humidity to adjust settings in subtle ways,” he explains.

And recommendation algorithms will also take the next step.

“Originally they were designed to keep you watching one more show,” he says. “The next step is to help you broaden the type of content being watched.”

The Smart Home market is set to generate about $3.5 billion in revenue in 2017, up 57% from last year. And as much as the Smart Home market relies on great hardware and software development it also relies on new types of networking technologies, like 5G which promised to redefine network environments by offering lower latency compared to today’s cellular networks. That lower latency allows for intelligent systems to connect diverse objects, ensuring that today’s gadgets become more nimble and responsive to user needs.

“Broadband and wifi are the modern version of electrification and indoor plumbing, two things that helped eventually drove the dishwasher market,” adds Dubravac. “There is a new age of futurism with specific applications pulled together with something like a digital assistant serving as the glue to bond them all together.”

Other two emerging market segments that will have an increased presence at CES will be drones and VR. Drone sales this year are expected to top 3.4 million units (up 40% from 2016) and VR sales will be up 79%, hitting 2.5 million in VR goggle sales that will drive $660 million in revenue.

“You can see a VR market taking hold and use cases are important as VR is ultimately a place shifting technology,” says Dubravac. “And that is the key aspect: when do we want to place shift? And when do we want live VR vs. time and place-shifted VR? There are a lot of use cases still to be developed for VR.”

The wearable market also continues to expand as there are 250 exhibitors at CES who are involved with wearable technologies and collectively they will expand the market from 48 million per year to 68 million per year by 2020.

“Wearables are digitizing and democratizing healthcare and are moving beyond the wrist,” says Dubravac.