Wen/Wang Xinxi
Today, the release of Apple's HomePod speakers means that the smart speaker battle has begun among Silicon Valley giants.
Google launched Google Home very early. Microsoft has announced that it will cooperate with Harman Kardon to integrate the Cortana Smart Assistant into smart speakers. Facebook has announced the acquisition of TwoBigEar, an immersive audio company, last year. Today, Apple also joined this battlefield.
So many giants couldn’t sit still. Alexa, the voice assistant from the current Amazon Echo speaker, has left Google Assistant, Cortana and Siri behind. According to statistics, Amazon’s echo sales will soon exceed 10 million units. In other words, smart speakers are currently being verified by Amazon and it may be an extremely important entry point for smart homes.
Although it is an extremely important entrance for future smart homes. But why is the smart speaker industry in the country currently not moving too much?
Of course, there are many domestic smart speaker manufacturers, but they are generally in a tepid state. Currently, among domestic smart speaker manufacturers, most are hardware manufacturers + Internet giants investment model.
Among them, including the smart speaker series is the collaboration between JD.com and HKUST. The intelligent cloud speakers of the Rambler series are in cooperation with Ali. The Sonos family of smart speakers is the cooperation with Tencent. This is totally different from the pattern that foreign countries are dominated by the Internet giant. It also means that the domestic Internet giants do not pay special attention to this area.
The overall quality of music market users is not high: most users do not catch cold on smart speakers
The reason on the one hand is that the market for smart speaker users has not risen. The overall music literacy and music art accumulation of domestic users is not high.
In China, it is obvious that one trend is that fewer and fewer good music are available, and there are fewer and fewer music audiences. The opposite is caused by square dance music and a variety of divine comedy.
Some industry music critics say that Divine Comedy is too hot, indicating that Chinese people do not like to listen to music too much. Nowadays, a variety of low-lying and inexpensive works of art are widely disseminated. It cannot be said that they are the responsibility of the artist and lack the ability to gather and discern art. It is the root cause of the problem.
If the overall quality of the domestic music audience is not high, smart speakers may not be able to detonate the market. In China, even if there is a certain hobby and interest audience for music, most of them use mobile phones to listen to songs. In foreign countries, the music market is very large. The proportion of music-loving users and those who are pursuing music is relatively higher.
Smart speaker products in domestic tepid, this one of the major reasons should be with the user community for smart speakers this product attribute is not a cold has an important relationship.
Chinese and Western middle class family life style differs from their cultural and economic development
As a new way of human-computer interaction in the Internet of Things era, intelligent speakers with voice interaction as the core are more representative of the lifestyle of the family and the middle class. At present, Amazon's echo sales will exceed 10 million units.
Echo is family-based, 10 million households cover between 30 million and 4,000 American families, and it has already reached one-tenth of the total population of the United States. Echo is rapidly moving from the early user’s niche circle into family-based units. Mass market.
The reason why it is a middle class lifestyle lies in the music culture and market environment it represents. According to data agencies, more than 35 million Americans have communicated with these smart speakers at least once a month. This figure has doubled from 2016. Behind it, there are reasons for the market environment, home culture and economic development level.
Smart home life will inevitably require a certain level of economic support. Take Echo as an example, its mode is voice voice control mode, main distance voice control, reservation of fast food, car service, alarm clock and timing, weather forecast, traffic status inquiries, etc. control smart home equipment, voice service Alexa let you in the room Any place to walk around, Echo can hear and perform corresponding tasks, such as turn on the lights, open TV and so on.
There are nearly 30 smart hardware products controlled by echo. This model determines that users who purchase echo smart speaker products must use this portal to control these homes. This means that potential users of the product must have a certain level of home furnishing and the entire family’s economic standard of living will not be low.
In China, the middle class, which is home-based and has a certain level of lifestyle and economy, has not become mainstream. Even if it does, there is no universal way to cultivate such a lifestyle.
AI voice interaction capability, gap between software and hardware integration capabilities
On the other hand, from the perspective of the giant Silicon Valley model, smart speakers rely on three core capabilities: intelligent voice interaction under AI drive, content services, and rich third-party applications. The core is AI ability.
Among foreign giants, AI voice assistant is basically standard. Amazon Echo's voice service assistant is Alexa, and Microsoft has announced that it will cooperate with Harman Kardon to integrate the Cortana Smart Assistant into smart speakers. The current HomePod speaker from Apple is also dependent on Siri for voice control. Google Home is behind Google Assistant.
However, in the smart speaker market in China, there is currently no AI intelligent voice assistant product that can be equipped with smart speakers to achieve soft and hard integration and relatively good voice interaction experience.
Both Amazon's ECho and Apple's Siri can be tuned to allow voice assistants to access more third-party services. However, due to the lack of AI voice assistants in the domestic Internet giants to make smart speakers, it is difficult to continuously optimize voice interactions and expand third-party voice service capabilities.
For example, JD Smart's smart speakers are equipped with the voice technology of HKUST's Xunfei. This has led to the loss of a core capability at the level of hardware and software integration and future platform ecology control.
It can be known that in the current smart speaker battle, the giants are also pushing their own AI intelligent voice assistant.
Because of the existence of AI, the current smart speaker has gone beyond the definition of the speaker, and at the technical level of speech equipment, it includes noise cancellation, speech recognition, and semantic recognition. Relying on the audio control of audio products, it integrates the intelligent recognition of intelligent speech technology and deep learning of interactive links, and continues to evolve based on deep learning in speech recognition and semantic understanding.
However, due to the level of development on the AI ​​intelligent voice assistant, the country is temporarily lagging behind. Moreover, for smart home products, the core is to rely on voice voice control, behind the artificial intelligence intelligence recognition capabilities and deep learning capabilities.
Domestic companies like Science and Technology News, Inc., and other companies are all equipped with voice recognition capabilities, but at present, the domestic smart speaker manufacturers do not have the platform advantage of artificial intelligence can form a platform for convergence and the combination of soft and hard.
In foreign countries, Google Assistant has teamed up with more than 70 smart home manufacturers to work together to include products such as washing machines, refrigerators, etc., while Amazon is actually based on voice-activated software Alexa has built an open platform based on voice products, earlier global electronics Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organizer of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), once said: “There are about 1,500 products that are equipped with Amazon's Alexa Voice Assistant.â€
Smart speakers, it's time to think about chasing
Domestic manufacturers pay more attention to the innovation of “business models†such as content resource integration and sales channels, instead of creating a business model through technological breakthroughs. Domestic hardware manufacturers are good at cost-effective gameplay, and they are often overstretched in R&D investment.
The big players of the Internet have initially wanted to become the masters of the smart home ecosystem. The rapid integration of software and hardware has made it difficult to have a good integration experience. At present, the Internet giant is currently using smart speaker products as a kind of trial and error investment project, and does not mention the height of strategic products to give sufficient attention, so that the product produced by platform investment + hardware manufacturers is difficult to emerge Explosive models.
In China, almost all smart home products rely on mobile phones for operation and control, and they are well-known for their ecological connections. However, from the experience point of view, many smart home products are not only tasteless but also redundant, and mobile phones are becoming a home remote control device. This is a burden for users, but outside the mobile phone, domestic manufacturers have not kept up with the rhythm if they are to interact via voice interaction.
Current domestic capital is highly concerned with artificial intelligence entrepreneurship and projects, but artificial intelligence technology must be placed in the actual product.
From the perspective of future trends, the giants such as Apple Amazon Google will vigorously promote the ecological layout of their own smart speakers and even home products to bring dividends to the domestic hardware industry chain and software developers. For the domestic Internet giants, smart speakers this time, it is time to think about it.
This article Source: micro-assessment hotspots (public number: redianweiping), Author: Wang Xinxi
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