In the past two years, smart speakers have been popular in the United States, with high sales. Following the amazing sales of 30 million units of Amazon Echo last year, the Apple HomePod smart speaker, which was just launched in February this year, has successfully won a 3% market share in the United States. However, the Chinese market, which has always been considered by the world to have huge consumption potential, has fallen into an awkward position in the field of smart speakers. So far, there has not been a smart speaker product with a single product sales exceeding 10 million units in China. Li Haibo, vice president of Himalaya, once said: "Only within one kilometer of Nanshan District, Shenzhen, there are 112 companies doing voice intelligence." There are so many companies doing smart speakers, but there are very few companies that have become product users. Few, no domestic company can replicate the myth of Echo. Obviously, for smart hardware, there is no sales, just empty talk. Someone once described the current domestic smart speaker market with such a sentence: the industry's explosive models have turned into a tasteless. The Sino-U.S. market The smart speaker melee started the year before, and it has been fought among the giants in Silicon Valley. In 2016, Google launched the Cortana smart speaker Invoke jointly developed by Google Home, Microsoft and Harman Kardon, which was also released last year. Immediately afterwards, Apple said it would launch HomePod speakers, but in the end the limelight was still dominated by Amazon. In 2017, Amazon's smart speaker Echo had outstanding sales performance. According to a set of total data released by the consulting company Cirp in January 2018, as of the end of 2017, there were more than 40 million smart speakers in use in the United States, of which Amazon accounted for 30 million. In China, the smart speaker war between giants is also fierce: Baidu’s Xiaodu at home, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, Xiaomi’s Xiaoai speaker, JD’s Dingdong speaker, etc. are all present, and new product launch conferences have opened one after another. . The story about smart speakers has also become more and more appealing: becoming a traffic portal, building an ecological platform, and even becoming a smart home terminal... The smart speaker industry has been extremely lively in the past two years. However, looking at the development of the domestic smart speaker field in the past two years, it is still too early to call it a "tuyere". More carnivals are unfolding between giants and startups and other companies, but the feedback from users has been much calmer. Even the foreign star product, Amazon Echo, has also appeared unacceptable in China. Compared with foreign countries, the sales volume can only be said to be unsatisfactory. According to GFK China's "China Smart Speaker Market Analysis" report, the domestic sales of smart speakers were only about 1,000 units in 2015 and increased to about 60,000 units in 2016. From January to October 2017, the total sales of smart speakers in the country just exceeded 100,000 units. Until Double Eleven, the sales volume of smart speakers reached 1.5 million units. But compared with Amazon's 30 million data, there is still a big gap. There is a price war in China. If you want to enter the market, you need to prepare to burn 1.5 billion In July last year, Xiaomi released the first artificial AI smart speaker "Xiao Ai", priced at 299 yuan, known as the "price butcher", and since then opened the door to price wars. At that time, the Tmall Genie X1 just released by Tmall was priced at 499 yuan, Jingdong’s smart speaker Jingdong Dingdong A3 was priced at 599 yuan, and the Rokid Pebble (Moonstone), known as the Chinese version of Echo, was officially priced at 1399 yuan on Tmall. , And other foreign listed Amazon Echo, Google Home, etc. are all above 1,000 yuan. In a sharp price comparison, the price of Xiaomi smart speakers has become a killer for acquiring users. Then, Ali and JD started to prepare for a grand price war on the eve of Double Eleven, in an attempt to seize the market through the double festival. During the Double Eleven, Ali’s Tmall Genie dropped to an ultra-low price of 99 yuan, while the promotional price of Jingdong Dingdong speakers was even as low as 49 yuan. This low-priced promotional method also brought obvious effects. The low price reflects the bloody wars of the companies entering the game in the battle of burning money and subsidies. But at present, artificial intelligence speakers are still in the stage of cultivating the market, which is the so-called "money burning period": high cost, low price, and still at the entry node to seize the track. Feng Xin, chairman and CEO of Baofeng Group, once said: If you want to occupy the smart speaker market, you must first prepare to burn 1.5 billion in 3 years. Last year, Qian Xue, the head of Alibaba AI Lab, once bluntly said in an interview: “My boss (Ma Yun) told me that I can’t even pay the utility bill if I rely on me to make money. The current artificial intelligence speaker market, It’s still in a state of land reclamation. Take Ali’s subsidies for smart speakers as an example. Its primary purpose is to get the entry ticket to enter smart speakers.†Qianxue believes that price is only a means of market education. What users can recognize is the product experience and service. In terms of profit model, there are currently two main ways in the industry. One is to cut into smart home scenarios such as Apple, Xiaomi, and go out to ask, and make money through hardware sales. Specifically, smart speakers are used to control home entertainment and smart centers, similar to consumers' virtual personal assistants, which open up their users' wearable devices, vehicles, and smart homes, and play a role as smart centers. The other is a giant company with Alibaba as a typical example. Its purpose is mainly to increase the company's GMV (total turnover), which is intended to be the traffic entrance in the AI ​​era. From Ali’s financial reports in recent years, it can be seen that although there is a large increase in users from FY 2014 to FY 2016, the growth is not obvious. The growth rate of GMV has slowed down. In addition to the original traffic channels, Ali urgently needs to add fresh traffic channels, which is one of the reasons why Ali has invested heavily. Technical flaws are difficult to break through: semantic recognition and Chinese language recognition Market research company Gartner analyst Tracy Tsai once made a relevant analysis of smart speakers: In terms of dialogue methods, some Chinese manufacturers’ devices have low voice recognition accuracy, and the overall understanding and response of Chinese natural language is still not mature enough. This is A key reason hindering popularization. Relevant industry insider Xu Fei (pseudonym) told Tencent Technology: "Semantic recognition is a pain point of current smart speakers, but it is also a major problem of AI technology. AI can beat Li Shishi in Go, but it may not be able to understand everyone now. What are you talking about." The voice technology of smart speakers can be divided into three stages: noise cancellation, speech recognition, and semantic recognition. Compared with foreign countries, the level of development of AI intelligent voice assistants in our country is currently in a relatively backward state. For products such as smart homes, the core of its technology is to rely on voice control, behind which is the intelligent recognition ability and deep learning ability of artificial intelligence. Although there have been certain breakthroughs in related technologies in China, companies such as iFLYTEK, Spitz and others are all manufacturers with voice recognition capabilities. But at present, domestic smart speaker manufacturers do not have the platform advantage in artificial intelligence, and can integrate resources across multiple vertical fields like Amazon and Google. For example, in foreign countries, Google Assistant has teamed up with more than 70 smart home manufacturers to work together, including the combination of washing machines, refrigerators and other products, while Amazon actually built an open platform based on voice products based on the voice control software Alexa. Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organizer of the Global Consumer Electronics Show (CES), once said: "Up to now, there are about 1,500 products equipped with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant." In addition, in addition to the reason of technical strength, the main problem of its semantic recognition lies in China's complex language environment. At present, the AI ​​speakers on the market only support Mandarin Chinese interaction, which is different from the humanistic environment in China, but the actual situation is not as simple as imagined: China has a vast territory and diverse dialects. According to incomplete statistics, only people cannot communicate with each other. There are more than 80 dialects. Although Putonghua has been popular for decades, as of today, there are still many people who cannot speak Putonghua; there are even more "pseudo Putonghua" mixed with dialects. In terms of context, it is also not conducive to machine voice learning and big data mobile phones. Compared with foreign smart products, the development of local smart speakers in our country requires several times more research and development effort only in terms of language. Similarly, this is also a problem for Amazon to become a local enterprise: even if Echo can enter the domestic market, the work of turning to Chinese recognition is enough to give Amazon a headache. Therefore, because the dialogue interaction technology of smart speakers in Chinese speech recognition and semantic interaction is not yet mature, it seriously affects the user experience. In the current transitional stage, improving the performance of the speakers and headphones itself is the top priority of the enterprise. Only when the language interaction interface technology takes shape and develops into a standard service, smart speakers may become popular in the Chinese market. There are huge differences in consumption habits of Chinese and foreign users Looking at China's smart home industry, it started relatively late compared to foreign countries as a whole. Up to now, consumers' demand for and purchase awareness for smart homes is still in its infancy, and their reliance on smart homes is low. Taking smart locks as an example, the penetration rate of some European, American, Japanese, and Korean countries has reached 60%, but according to relevant data, the usage rate of smart locks in China in 2017 was less than 3%. Generally speaking, the lag of the smart home industry is the primary reason hindering the development of speakers. In this regard, industry insider Xu Fei said: “In fact, there is no habit of using artificial intelligence technology in China. Smart speakers are developing relatively rapidly in the entire AI field. In fact, we can also see a big problem from this, that is, smart speakers. There is no standardization of the core value of, and the core needs of users have not been captured. Many people are paying for intelligence rather than sound quality. In general, regardless of whether the key lies in technology, but how to make technology fit your life Demand, AI needs real applications." Domestic smart home industry capacity lags behind In addition to the current low user acceptance of the product, the main problem is that China's smart home production capacity is lagging, and it is difficult to supply a certain volume of products in terms of production capacity, which also increases the difficulty of smart speaker output. Some media pointed out that from last year's Double Eleven, we can see the problem of smart speakers in terms of production capacity. At the beginning of the double festival, the total sales volume of Tmall Genie reached 1 million units by 9 o'clock that day, but then the page was sold out. Until 8pm, Tmall sold another 20,000 units in the form of "One more thing" as a finishing touch. Users have found that the delivery date after purchasing smart speakers has a long delay, most of which are before November 30 and December 31. From the side, it can be seen that even Ali is unable to achieve the capacity of smart speakers, not to mention other newcomers who have just entered the game. From this point of view, rather than talking about a smart speaker battle, the competition behind it is the capital background of the entering company, AI technology background, resource integration, and market development and many other capabilities. But despite this, there is still an optimistic attitude towards the Chinese market. Recently, IDC China director Antonio Wang predicted that smart speakers will be the next major consumer electronics trend in China, and China is expected to become the second largest smart speaker market after the United States. Antonio said: "In 2016, drones were in power, in 2017, there was a fever for virtual and augmented reality, and in 2018, switching to smart speakers stood out." Will such a prediction be realized this year? Will smart speakers be able to overcome the current problems and become the next-generation human-computer interaction portal? We will wait and see. Intel Nuc I5,Intel Nuc 11 I5,I5 Mini Pc,Intel Nuc 10 I5 Guangdong Elieken Electronic Technology Co.,Ltd. , https://www.elieken.com