Google Tipped To Launch AI Smart Display For The Holiday Shopping Season

When Amazon trotted out its Echo Show smart speaker with a display built in, almost everyone speculated that competitors in the AI smart speaker market would be bringing out similar products. That proved accurate at CES 2018 in January, when LG, Lenovo, and JBL all rolled out their own smart speakers packing a display. The company conspicuously missing from the smart display segment at CES was Google. The odd part is that Google is one of the biggest names in the entire smart speaker segment currently with its Google Home device.. In September we learned Google was working on a product for the segment.

A new report published this week shows that the smart speaker market is booming in Q2 of this year and that the brand leading the charge is Google. Though Lenovo stepped out first with its own impressive Smart Display that we recently reviewed, it's apparently time for Google to roll out its own Echo Show competitor, and a rumor going around claims that launch will happen this year. We are more than halfway through the year and you can bet Google is hoping to have the speaker in market in time for the holiday shopping season.

The report comes from Nikkei Asian Review, and all we know about a launch date right now is a vague "before the end of the year." Google has been hard at work on getting its smart display off the ground and the company handed out prototyping kits at Google I/O. As for the most likely time for Google to unveil the new smart display, odds are on October.

That is the month already rumored for the Pixel 3 unveil and Google will have a large audience watching that event to see what the new smartphones offer. It would be the perfect time to unveil the smart display as well. Of course, the October launch date isn’t confirmed but October is also the month when both previous versions of the Pixel were unveiled. Consumers looking for a smart speaker with a display will probably flock to Google's offering whenever it launches. A recent Canalys report shows that Google had a 449% year-over-year growth in Google Home shipments, putting it ahead of Amazon in the smart assistant speaker market for Q2 2018.