Smart speaker sales reached 19.08 million units nationwide in the first half of this year, rising 22.7 percent compared with the same period last year, and related sales revenue totaled 3.56 billion yuan ($511.6 million), an increase of 18.3 percent year-on-year, according to market consultancy All View Cloud.

AVC predicted sales of smart speakers will amount to 42.6 million units in 2020, up 15.7 percent on a yearly basis, despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. The top three Chinese vendors, including Alibaba, Baidu and Xiaomi, accounted for 95.6 percent of overall market share during the January to June period.

Wang Jun, an All View Cloud analyst, said the demand for online education has surged during the outbreak, and smart speakers equipped with displays are becoming increasingly popular among tech-savvy consumers.

Chinese internet search giant Baidu Inc is banking on the rapid growth of the smart speaker market in China and stepping up efforts to conduct research on speech interaction technologies.

The smart voice assistant sector is at the dawn of explosive growth, said Jing Kun, corporate vice-president of Baidu and general manager of Baidu's smart living group, while noting people spent more time watching videos by virtue of Xiaodu smart speakers with a build-in touch screen during the pandemic.

"The next phase of the development of the smart voice sector is 'breaking the circle of simply general-purpose use'. In my opinion, there are two ways to do so," Jing said.

"One is specifying features to target groups of users to better satisfy their needs, such as families with kids. That's breaking the circle from existing products. The other way is to extend application scenarios beyond the home. We will release some portable products in the second half of the year, hoping that a brand new set of scenarios will form," Jing said.