Android founder's startup has a smart home play (GOOGL)

Essential, Android founder Andy Rubin's mobile-focused startup, unveiled a smart speaker on Tuesday known as Home alongside a handful of other products, reports The Verge.

Powered by Essential's new Ambient OS, Home can control smart home devices, answer basic questions, stream music, and set timers. It can also take action without being prompted, like issuing appointment reminders. The device will reportedly ship later this summer, according to Wired, but pricing information hasn't yet been released.

The company is betting its eventually large ecosystem and unique qualities will help it gain users as the smart home market grows. BI Intelligence forecasts that 73 million smart devices will be installed in US households by 2023, marking steady growth in the smart home market. That could create opportunities for companies like Essential, which likely hopes that features like unprompted actions could attract users, especially in an increasingly crowded space. And Ambient OS is open-source, which could lead to more devices coming to market quickly, strengthening the ecosystem.

But other dominant players make it unlikely that Essential will be able to carve out a large market share. Amazon and Google own the smart speaker market — Echo alone is in 9 million households, for example. And they're beginning to make ecosystem plays — by offering third-party integration, working to move into the car, and building a presence on consumers' mobile devices, for example. In addition, though neither Amazon nor Google has brought unprompted functionality to market yet, it's on the way for both. That means that Essential is probably not special enough to get a majority of users to abandon their existing platforms. On top of that, consumers pursuing smart home devices for the first time might be more willing to adopt a familiar name like Amazon or Google, to which they already have loyalty, than a smaller, lesser known party. That could pave a challenging path for Essential if it wants to get competitive quickly.

The US smart home market has still yet to meet the expectations many observers had in the early part of this decade.

The same issues BI Intelligence first identified back in 2015 still plague the space — persistently high prices, technological fragmentation, and consumers' lack of a perceived benefit from the devices.

But the newfound popularity of smart home voice control has revolutionized smart home ecosystems across the country, and convinces more consumers to equip their homes with smart devices on a daily basis. The Amazon Echo, released in 2014, has become immensely popular and capable, awakening users to the utility of both voice control and smart home devices. This has prompted companies to rush to release competing devices and integrate voice control into their smart home ecosystems.

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Android founder's startup has a smart home play (GOOGL)

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