In the hot summer, after a busy day, I drag my tired body home from get off work, open the door, turn on the light in the entrance, and run to the soft sofa. At this moment, you just want to rest or watch TV, but you can’t find the TV. And the air conditioner remote control...
In the cold winter, when I finished washing, I went to bed, turned on the light and read a book for a while, then looked at the phone for a while, the bed was also warm. I just wanted to lie down and sleep, and found that the light in the living room or bathroom was not turned off...
These scenes often appear in our daily lives, and the voice interaction provided by smart speakers is considered the best way to solve this situation.
In 2017 Double 11, smart speakers ushered in an important development node in China. Ali announced that "Tmall Genie" had sold 1 million units, and JD's "Dingdong Speaker" also achieved a year-on-year growth of three digits. There are other smart speaker players who have more or less got a share. The million-level success has allowed the domestic market to obtain an entry ticket for a smart speaker.
After a year of precipitation, there are currently four players in the smart speaker market in China: software platform manufacturers, including Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, JD, Cheetah, etc.; smart hardware manufacturers, typical of Xiaomi and Huawei; large home appliance manufacturers , Take Haier as a typical example; others include Rokid, Go Ask, Himalaya and other entrepreneurial enterprises. According to incomplete statistics, at present, there are nearly 50 companies that have released smart speaker products, and at least 500 related hardware companies or technology providers are active in the front line.
The reason why smart speakers become the focus of competition for "big guys" is that, on the one hand, it involves a wide range of fields and it is easy to find entry points and breakthroughs, such as single products and platforms; on the other hand, because of the huge market potential, everyone is possible Share a piece of the pie. According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, my country's market sales reached 1.76 million units in 2017, with sales of 490 million. Market sales in 2018 are expected to be 4.25 million units, a year-on-year increase of 141%, and sales of 1.36 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 178%.
On the face of it, many companies are fighting, in fact, smart speakers still haven't gotten rid of the embarrassing situation of "applauding but not popular".
Qian Chen, the former CTO of Hammer Technology, once said that behind the contending of a hundred schools of thought, the concept of smart speakers may be played badly. It is also asserted that Chinese smart speakers seem to be very hot, but most of them will die out.
There are two reasons. One is that the domestic smart speaker market adopts a low-price and rapid penetration strategy. It is not profit-oriented and sets product prices low and low, which is contrary to normal market rules. For example, the original price of 499 yuan Tmall Genie is only 99 yuan, and the 299 yuan Dingdong top sells cabbage for 49 yuan. Chen Xiaoliang, Chairman and CEO of Sound Intelligence Technology, once said that burning money to speed up the process of market awareness and rapid sales is of great benefit to cultivating users. But the way out of the product is definitely not to burn money, but ultimately to tap and satisfy the user experience.
Second, the industry is facing many problems such as weak innovation capabilities, poor product experience, insufficient content and functions, and low user awareness. A survey from AVC has shown that 57% of Chinese consumers have heard of smart speakers, and 23% of consumers have a certain understanding of smart speakers. However, the frequency and duration of use of smart speakers after purchase are different. not ideal.
Obviously, it takes a long way for smart speakers to truly detonate the Chinese market. So now, how to break through the vicious circle of "applauding but not popular"?
First of all, a technological breakthrough is a step that needs to be taken in the development of smart speakers.
In terms of human-computer interaction, voice technology is a hard task. The more devices that wake up and the more users use it, the better the training of voice recognition, response speed, and learning ability, the more likely the product will quickly occupy the market.
At present, the voice interaction of smart speakers can only be a modest response, which is relatively monotonous. Cross-scenarios and cross-task dialogues often cannot go on, and the ability to understand contextual information is weak. In addition to speech recognition, semantic understanding is currently a technical difficulty that major companies need to overcome.
Dr. Hong Xiaowen, Dean of Microsoft Research Asia, pointed out that to achieve 100% semantic understanding is an AI complete problem, and only when other AI problems are solved can it be solved. "For example, if you go to a cocktail party, the surroundings are very noisy. I didn’t understand the ten of the nine words in what you said, but because I probably know what you said, I can still guess it even if I can’t hear it clearly. What are you talking about. But if you use speech recognition and semantic understanding, it may fail. In specific application scenarios, in addition to speech, it also includes the integrated use of vision and knowledge. This is the future challenge of speech artificial intelligence."
Second, it makes sense to make products that stick to users. Looking for rigid demand scenarios and pain points that are suitable for domestic users will be the key. It is about whether the battle of smart speakers will continue in the past. After high-tech was played as cabbage prices, the entire industry was damaged and most manufacturers were out of the game. The path also determines whether the voice interaction platform derived from smart speakers by the giants will become the key to the next-generation operating system.
At present, whether it is the function or the service behind it, smart speakers have not really grasped the pain points of users. For example, for users with high music requirements, the sound quality of smart speakers cannot meet their needs. For users whose music requirements are not so high, ordinary Bluetooth speakers are more economical.
Zhou Pin, director and senior vice president of Cheetah Mobile, believes that after the midfield, the logic of smart speaker products will return to the essence of sound, in-depth layout on the source of sound quality and music, and use sound quality to attract and impress the original needs of users on speakers .
According to Xiang Wenjie, vice president of Rokid, a startup company in Hangzhou, there are two directions for the development of smart speakers in the future: partial Internet play, lower speaker prices, and "send" products to improve their business chain or product platform. It’s “distributed†to enhance the user experience and make users inseparable from smart speakers.
In general, the potential market demand has always existed, so that users can truly experience the joy of human-computer interaction and experience through voice, so that they can beat low-dimensional with high-dimensional and quickly break the game.
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