OFweek smart home network news Compared with Google, the early morning Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) rhythm.
Apple released a series of new hardware and new products and services in a row. For example, a variety of operating systems, including iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4; new iPad Pro; new iMac Pro; and a new product over the years: HomePod.
One factor throughout the entire WWDC is that it is machine learning. For a long time Apple has been considered slow in artificial intelligence, but Apple is obviously not far behind.
What AI muscles did Apple show? Let's say one by one.
CoreML
Let's read the full name of WWDC: the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Behind the better Siri on iOS 11 and AR on mobile phones is naturally a new tool for developers. Core ML is Apple's newly introduced machine-oriented learning framework for developers.
According to Apple, Core ML makes it easier for developers to use machine learning in their apps. Text analysis, face recognition, and other features can all rely on this tool. Apple said that with Core ML, face recognition on iPhone is 6 times faster than on Google Pixel.
Core ML supports all major neural networks: Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). In addition, it supports SVM (Support Vector Machine) and linear models and Tree integration.
With Core ML support, developers can encapsulate training-completed machine learning models into the App.
Apple emphasizes the consistent style of user privacy and has inherited it from Core ML. Core ML lets all machine learning calculations happen natively on iOS devices.
In addition to supporting deep learning models that exceed 30 layers, Core ML also supports Tree ensembles, SVM, and generalized linear models.
Core ML also seamlessly switches between CPU and GPU to provide the best performance and efficiency. Currently Core ML provides both visual and natural language APIs.
By the way, Apple also introduced the AR development kit ARKit for developers.
Siri
In iOS 11, Siri got a big upgrade.
As early as last month, there were rumors that Apple wanted Siri to support more apps, from pretending to chat with you and using iOS's native features, to apps that could be installed on your phone.
The rumors came true, Apple announced at WWDC that Siri supports a range of third-party applications, including WeChat, a feature called Siri Kit.
However, how could Apple completely be said by rumors?
In addition to supporting third-party applications, Siri has more powerful tricks: more natural speech, real-time translation, and more accurate predictions.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of technology, said, “We use deep learning to create a more natural and expressive voice for Siri.â€
Immediately afterwards, he played the English version of Siri's voice, and the male version told the joke at the beginning of this article. Do not know how the native speaker feels, the mother tongue of the qubit is not English, and it sounds like it really doesn't feel much different from real people. However, when he later showed real-time translations, he asked Siri to talk about Chinese. Although it sounded a lot better than it is today, it still looks like a machine.
In real-time translation, when you ask Siri "How do you say ... in Chinese?" in English, Siri will immediately translate your words into Chinese characters and display them on the screen. They will also read them in Chinese.
This real-time translation function first supports English to Chinese, Western, Italian, French, and German.
In addition, Siri can learn more about the user's interests by using machine learning. He can recommend news, help users reply messages, or request the user to add events to the calendar based on the user's booking behavior in the browser.
HomePod
Yes, HomePod is the legendary Apple smart speaker. The price is $349.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia will be the first three countries to launch, but the official release will have to wait until December of this year. Other countries and regions will wait until next year for sale.
The release of this new product not only added an item to the bucket of Apple's family, but once again confirmed the unstoppable trend of the new trend. With the release of Apple Siri, the top three technology giants in the United States: Apple, Google, Amazon, all joined the smart speaker market competition.
Just a few days before the start of the Apple conference, Google announced that Google Home smart speakers will be available in Canada at the end of the month, and will immediately start pre-sales, and the government will also cut prices for promotions. However, Home has also experienced problems in recent days, and many users have feedback that this smart speaker has lost its response.
basic situation
â–³ qubit Note: At present, Google Home official website discount, starting from June 4, the price is reduced to 109 US dollars.
The HomePod is about 7 inches high, with 7 surround speakers on the bottom and a built-in subwoofer. The entire product is controlled by the A8 chip and supports real-time sound modeling. Through the chip, HomePod can complete the sound field settings, noise reduction and voice recognition work, but also to identify and adjust the space.
Sound quality
After all, it is a speaker, how to talk about sound quality.
At today's conference, Apple talked about how good HomePod sound is, but it's not yet clear. Because today's HomePod can only see, can not touch, and the scene exhibits no sound.
In the other two homes, Home offers a richer surround sound quality, Echo has flaws in bass, but some people feel more natural. After the recent Home upgrade, it also supports Bluetooth playback, which is finally catching up with Echo. Both devices support Pandora and Spotify.
Of course there are some differences, Echo supports Amazon Music; Home supports Google Play Musci, YouTube Red; HomePod clearly supports Apple Music.
voice control
Smart speakers mainly use voice interaction to control music playback, search, smart home and so on. Echo's wakeup instructions are rich: Hey Alexa, Alexa, Amazon, Echo, and computer all work. Home's wakeup instructions are: OK, Google and Hey, Google. HomePod will definitely use: Hey Siri.
These products use far-field speech recognition technology. Echo and Home can recognize the user's voice instructions 15 meters away. HomePod is said to be further away.
On the hardware side, Amazon Echo uses a 6+1 configuration ring microphone array, and Google Home uses a two-microphone solution. Echo can better position the sound source. The HomePod released by Apple uses six microphones for sound collection.
Virtual Assistant
Inside each smart speaker, there is an artificial intelligence program. Echo lives with Alexa and Google Home lives with Google Assistant. HomePod lives with Siri.
In terms of using the experience, Google Assistant can get more information from the Internet, so it can also better answer the user's questions, and Alexa is more adept at handling shopping-related requests. Regarding Siri, you can now try it out on your iPhone.
Google Assistant goes further in voice interaction and can continue to answer relevant questions from users based on the previous question. There is no doubt that Google has obvious advantages in answering questions.
According to information released by Apple, HomePod can now play music, news, weather and stock information, set reminders, inform traffic and nearby conditions, and integrate with HomeKit to control smart home devices.
Of course, the voice interaction of all the above smart speakers must be done in English.
Functional expansion
Home currently has 200 third-party skills that can help users order pizzas from Domino, as well as from Uber. However, Echo has mastered more than 11,000 new skills and can add events to Google Calendar and extract details from Gmail. However, Home cannot do this.
Echo can help you make free calls or send text messages to any user who uses Echo or Alexa App. Google Home can now call the phone.
Google’s products support multi-user and multi-room features. Home can identify the voices of up to six users and can seamlessly switch accounts and settings for different users.
Amazon's users have to talk to Echo “to switch accounts to somethingâ€. Home can sync audio in different rooms, and Echo is not yet available.
At present, HomePod's performance in this area is still unknown. However, it can be imagined that Siri will certainly have a more substantial update in the future when it is officially launched, supporting this new hardware.
Competitive analysis
In the smart speaker market, Amazon is an absolute pioneer.
On November 6, 2014, Amazon launched Echo for members and invited users. This product was officially launched in the United States on June 23, 2015. At present, there are three different types of Echo products sold on Amazon. Prices range from $50 to $230, targeting different user groups.
Google played the role of chaser. In May 2016, Google officially launched Home at the I/O Conference. At the I/O conference in May 2017, Home released some new features. However, currently Google Home still has only one model for sale, but the choice of color schemes is even more abundant.
According to a report from eMarketer, the smart speaker market, Amazon Echo, is the only one with a market share of 70% and Google Home has a share of 23%. All others share 5%. Now that Apple has also come in, I do not know how this pattern will develop in the future.
From this pattern, Google's biggest response to Apple's inning is also reasonable.
In fact, when Amazon Echo was launched, it was not taken seriously. However, to this day, cumulative sales of this product are said to have reached 1 billion US dollars, and market analysis agencies predict that by 2020 Amazon's smart speaker sales will be Up to 10 billion U.S. dollars, billions of product sales.
The survey also showed that users of all ages in the U.S. market have also seen a significant increase in the use of voice control equipment. This is also a result of the development of related technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Smart speakers seem to be "not complicated," but they actually require artificial intelligence in many areas such as speech recognition, semantic analysis, and virtual assistants to support them.
Other points iOS 11
iCloud can synchronize cloud content in iMessage. iMessage also joins Apple Pay to transfer money directly in the conversation.
Siri will support more applications such as WeChat, and through deep learning can understand the user's speech, further know the interests and hobbies in context, and even predict the app that the user will open.
The new version of Camera will support the HEVC encoding format, and the compression rate of each photo will be doubled. iOS 11 can also extract still pictures from Live videos.
iOS 11 also redesigned the control center and notification center. iOS 11 also added features such as QR code scanning, fraud message recognition, Pinyin keyboard, and Shanghai dialect recognition for the Chinese market.
In addition, macOS High Sierra provides a better Safari browser, the new Mail better support search and reduce storage space.
hardware
The new iPad Pro is released. Supports 10 hours of battery life, 12-core Apple A10 processor, 40% increase in image performance, 12 million-pixel camera, optical image stabilization, and 4K video recording support. The new iPad Pro is available in 10.5 and 12.9 inch sizes and starts at $649 and $799.
The new iMac Pro is released, and all its products are equipped with a 27-inch 5K screen, 128GB ECC memory, 4TB SSD hard drive, and a new workstation-grade graphics card Radeon Vega. The iMac Pro will come with an 8-, 10-, and 18-core Intel Xeon processor starting at $4,999.
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