Sales of tablets, such as Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, may have peaked with consumers preferring smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and TV for information and entertainment.
Deloitte, in its technology, media and telecommunications predictions for 2017, is forecasting that tablet sales will drop by 10 per cent this year, to 165 million units worldwide.
Deloitte senior partner Clare Harding said that a growing array of smartphones and lighter laptops mean that people are questioning the wisdom of owning a tablet.
"The smarts in the smartphone and the sizes mean that tablets are less attractive," she said.
"We think there's a natural limit to what you can do on the device and it hasn't found its killer app."
In Australia, across gender and six demographics, the tablet was the preferred device for one of 15 categories in two demographics, the 45-54 age range and the 65 plus range. These groups preferred the tablet over other devices for playing games.
Globally, Deloitte is predicting that household adoption of tablets will reach a plateau at a substantially lower level than other consumer electronic devices.
"In the US in 2015, 74-84 per cent of those over 14 years old have access to a smartphone, laptop computer or flat panel television," Deloitte's report said.
"In contrast, access to tablets is 56 per cent, at about the same level as gaming consoles and digital video recorders, and up by only two percentage points from 2014, even though tablets face a much less challenging base than more ubiquitous devices."
At the same time, Deloitte is predicting a major uptick in the amount of smartphones sold with machine learning capabilities.
Deloitte is predicting 300 million smartphones, or more than a fifth of units expected to be sold in 2017, will have these capabilities.
Deloitte National TMT leader Stuart Johnston said that the devices being built, either hardware or software, are designed to mimic different functions of the human brain.
"Many of these functions already exist today through a connection with the network," he said.
"What we're seeing in the year ahead is that the smartphones being released can actually do this without a connection to the network."
This will allow for a number of applications, including indoor navigation, augmented reality, language translation and more, to run without being connected to a network because the phone can learn and adapt on its own.
"An example would be computer translation: years ago translation consisted of looking up a word or two in one language from a stored dictionary, and substituting a word or two in another language. This kind of large-scale statistical machine translation was better than nothing, but far from perfect," the Deloitte report said.
"By adding neural machine translation, translation is not done piecemeal, but sentences at a time, yielding results that are significantly more grammatical, idiomatic, and easier to understand. In 2016, this was all done in the cloud, not on the mobile device, but one day this kind of translation and other tasks such as recognising objects in images may be able to be done natively."
