A new report from MarketsandMarkets suggests that the demand for far-field voice recognition tech will skyrocket in the next few years. The market is expected to jump from $969 million in 2018 to $3.5 billion by 2024 thanks to the rising popularity of smart speakers, smart TVs, and an ever-expanding range of other smart devices.

North America – and the US in particular – is expected to be the largest market for far-field voice recognition, while linear microphone arrays are expected to be the most common technological layout. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things will fuel much of the growth as speech and voice recognition are integrated into more smartphones, thermostats, fridges, lights, and countless other items.

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising finding in the report is that fully half of all internet searches will be conducted by voice input by 2020, which suggests that many of us are already using our voices instead of our keyboards when punching something into Google (MarketsandMarkets attributes the statistic to MindMeld, a speech recognition API provider). Even if that number ends up being a little off, the use of speech recognition tech is obviously accelerating as it becomes more reliable and more popular.    

In previous reports, MarketsandMarkets has forecasted a similarly rosy outlook for the risk-based authentication market and the biometrics market more generally. These latest findings echo a separate report from IDTechEx, which suggests the voice recognition market will hit $15.5 billion by 2029.

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(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)