China's smart speaker ushered in the field of the first million-level players in the past 'double 11' period, Ali's Lynx Wizard smart speaker total sales exceeded 1 million units, and before that, Lynx Genie total Sales less than 100,000 units.
Burst of sales and its substantial price concessions are not unrelated, during the 'double 11', Lynx elf launched a super member 99 yuan purchase activities, and this product in the past the market price of 499 yuan.
In an interview with 21st Century Business Herald, Alibaba's AI Lab director, Shaw Xue, said that the reason for setting the price of 99 yuan is to educate the market and hope to bring the smart speaker product out of the lab.
Burn money to cultivate the market
July 5 this year, Ali AI Labs introduced Alibaba's first consumer-level AI products - 'Lynx Wizard' intelligent speaker.
Before Ali, whether it is foreign Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, or the domestic Jingdong, IETF fly, Lenovo, have launched their own smart speakers, but Ali is still entering the crowded track, because it thinks Voice will be the only way to human-computer interaction in the future.
Although the concept of artificial intelligence has been quite hot, but shallow snow that it is still in a primary stage, in particular, the current smart speaker market, but also in a wasteland.
She told reporters that this subsidy efforts, because they think smart speakers have been born a long time, but the real number of users get the hand is very small.
In the relatively mature overseas smart speaker market, millions of sales can only be regarded as 'tickets', before reaching this sales, developers tend to choose to wait and see.Only reach this amount, it is possible to attract more developers .
For Ali AI Labs, the number is the key to opening up the market for the future. "For the industry, at least we have proved that the smart speaker market in China is not a fake proposition .After breaking this threshold, these two days have received a lot of advice , A lot of developers have turned from wait-and-see to action, "said Light Snow.
However, some people questioned the market that the Lynx genie smashed through the price subsidy, that this will not withstand the test of consumers, which, shallow snow told 21st Century Business Herald reporter, the price is only a means of market education, the real Whether it's user acceptance or product experience and service.
In its opinion, 'From these two days of user reviews, the Lynx Genie has given the vast majority of users a whole new experience that is fun, whether they stand the test or take time to prove.'
Light snow also revealed a set of data, the current Lynx Genie users wake up an average of 60 times per day, the proportion of active users is as high as 95%.
Voice interaction is not the end
When the Lynx Genie was just released, Jack Ma commented on the product's temperament much like 2003 or 2004 Taobao, thinking it was full of fun to explore and discover.
At that time, Lynx Elves can achieve smart home control, voice shopping, cell phone recharge, audio and music playback, more than 30. After four months of evolution, this number tripled.
According to the introduction of light snow, Lynx elf updated every week, now has about 100 first-level features, each of the following will be broken down into more different types of which the higher the use of several features include tools Classes, Audio Classes, Encyclopedia Classes and Smart Home Controls.
The industry generally believes that the smart phone is the entrance of the mobile Internet, and voice with biometric identification will become the entrance of the Internet of Things era.Therefore, the major Internet giants have made their utmost efforts in the field of voice recognition, machine intelligence, the Internet and other areas of research, Ali also No exception.
One month ago, Dr. Nie Zaiqing, chief researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Li Mingyang, technical director of Google Tango and DayDream, joined Ali AI Lab, in which Nie Zaiqing served as AI Lab's Beijing Research and Development Center, Outstanding scientist in machine vision.
Light snow told reporters that at present, Alibaba AI research direction covers almost all can think of cutting-edge technology in the future, people and machines will certainly be further escalation.
At this stage, artificial intelligence is slowly moving from 2.0, based on big data learning, to 2.0 where people can interact with each other. In the 3.0 phase, the machine will have its own point of view, but it is still an ideal situation.
Advanced at any stage needs to be supported by technology, said Shallow snow, through deep learning, machine learning will be able to achieve artificial intelligence 2.0, but to achieve the state of 3.0, must be combined with inferential technology and knowledge map.
According to 21st Century Business Herald reporter, after Dr. Nie Zaiqing joined Ali, his key breakthroughs include knowledge maps and natural language comprehension.