A new vision for the combination of smart home and voice assistant since Amazon released smart speaker Echo in 2014. Big makers such as Google and Apple also joined the battle to launch smart speakers of various market orientations (Table 1).
According to market research firm Global Market Insights research report pointed out that the global smart speaker market in 2016 was 400 million US dollars, is expected to rapidly grow to 130 billion US dollars by 2024. Intelligent horn market prospects, the growth rate will also be very fast.In addition COMPUTEX TAIPEI co-sponsored Taipei Computer Association, also released a few days ago news that since September 2017 opening 2018 show online login, see a lot of end-point AI devices, voice assistant solutions and other innovations Application Product Manufacturers' Exhibit Taipei Computer Association further analyzed that this trend is due to the maturity of the AI (Voice Assistant), which can be linked with the functions of voice assistant, search, inquiry and daily shopping. Provide a more complete artificial intelligence living service.
For the Chinese market, China's major online giants have also released their own smart horn products since 2015. And as the European and American markets generally have their own market advantages, for example, Alibaba and Amazon have mastered quite a large number of electronic The market share of the business market enables consumers to experience more complete shopping services through different channels through their smart speakers. Xiaomi, which is similar to Apple, has accumulated a lot of well-proven hardware devices before its launch, Allows a more complete series between the hardware, allowing consumers to achieve a more intelligent home life.
To promote the realization of smart home, it must be perfect match with real life mode to create consumer demand.According to data provided by NPR And Edison Research pointed out that 87% of users who have purchased smart speakers, expect to be able to voice Enter the interface to search for information.Thus, Chinese speech recognition technology is the first technical threshold to run the Chinese market must break through (Figure 1).
Figure 1 intelligent speaker users to buy the purpose of statistics
Cross-cultural identification in line with Taiwan's real-life situation
Zhang Zhenkui, Deputy Leader of IT Promotion Department of ITRI, said that ITRI has been integrating voice recognition technology developed for many years since the fourth quarter of 2016 to develop ITRI voice assistant. Out of the most suitable living habits of voice assistants in Taiwan compared to the international brands launched voice assistant, smart speaker products, ITRI voice assistants have been able to do more accurate Chinese speech recognition is currently actively developing multi-language recognition capabilities, the future ITRI voice assistants can also accurately identify user instructions (see Figure 2) if they include English or Taiwanese words in Chinese.
Figure 2 ITRI Institute of Technology Deputy Chief Zhang Zhenkui pointed out that ITRI voice assistants have been able to do more than the international manufacturers of Chinese speech recognition.
In the future, in addition to continuously developing more language recognition functions such as English and Taiwanese, and continuing to develop market applications, the ITRI voice assistant will continue to focus on optimizing semantic understanding in Chinese .First, due to the different national or regional dialects, there will be Different ways of using grammar and semantics, in the future, ITRI will rapidly expand the semantic database of different languages by combining with machine learning technology, and furthermore, it is often the case that all family members use a piece of equipment together in the context of intelligent speaker usage. Therefore, it is also important to develop the speaker recognition function through the voiceprint recognition technology, so that the smart speaker can collect the complete and correct user behavior data.Finally, the user's voice emotion is also one of the focuses of development in the future. The tone at the time of inputting the message, the urgency of determining the user's instruction, and the change in mood are unknown to other human-machine interfaces, so the mood of intonation in the future will also be precious data that can be collected by speech recognition one.
Zhang Zhenkui analysis, although the market size is relatively small in Taiwan, but still its market to be vendor development.Most of Taiwan's related manufacturers to OEM sales as the main source of profit, many routers and other products production network operators, has also started the foundry Smart speakers and export. In addition to hardware production technology, Taiwan also has a very mature e-commerce platform; telecom operators provide content services such as music, movies, books and other quite complete in Europe and the United States quite successful intelligent speaker business model elements In other words, Taiwan can provide quite complete services in the same area.
Chinese speaker intelligent speaker profit model varies
Although the dominant operating profit model for Amazon Echo remains the eCommerce platform shopping guide, statistics by NPR And Edison Research show that 90% of smart speaker users say listening to music is one of the reasons they buy smart speakers , Google also introduced Google Home Max, which flaunts the same high-quality audio as the Apple HomePod at Made by Google in 2017. In 2017, Amazon introduced more intelligent speakers with different features, such as lens-mounted Echo Show and Echo Look combined with the monitor.With the data collected by major manufacturers gradually complete, the market positioning of the new generation of smart speakers more accurate.Next in the European and American markets, smart speakers how to voice assist at the core, the expansion of technical functions and Market positioning, it is worth continuing attention.
Figure 3 Google launched Google Home Max featuring high-quality audio in 2017 and the Google Home Mini at a lower price. Image credit: Google
In addition, the smart speakers launched by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi in 2017 have all witnessed substantial growth in the Chinese market. Zhang Xiaoping, Senior Marketing Manager, Microprocessors and Microcontrollers Greater China, NXP It is estimated that in 2018, the market in China will develop more rapidly than in 2017, with about 20 million smart speakers on the market (Figure 4).
Figure 4 Zhang Xiaoping, Senior Marketing Manager, Microprocessors and Microcontrollers Greater China, NXP Greater China estimates that the Chinese market will grow even faster in 2018 than in 2017.
However, at present, both in China and in the global market, the popularization of smart speakers needs to be improved.Zhang Xiaoping believes that the current low accuracy of Chinese semantic understanding is the main reason that smart speakers can not be popularized.For example, current intelligent assistant services often require However, this is not the most intuitive way to use.Zhang Xiaoping predicts that in the future, wake-up words will be voiceprint recognition, intelligent recognition technology optimization out; in the voice of the assistant to be able to Recognition of user voiceprint and analysis of the context of voice commands to determine the way in order to achieve the most close to the natural human behavior of voice and man-machine interface.However, because the Chinese brand of smart speakers are listed at a very low price for the market education and promotion All have considerable help.Although this technology requires a very high level of artificial intelligence, Zhang predicts that this technology will make major breakthroughs by 2020 and reach the ultimate product type of speech recognition.
Zhang further pointed out that different generations of users have different characteristics, for digital natives born after 1990, all things networking situation will be taken for granted as they become the backbone of society, smart home era Will come.
In the current smart speaker market in China, the competition has killed the Red Sea.However, compared to profit by selling hardware, for manufacturers more important is to get more data to correct voice processing capabilities.Zhang Xiaoping believes that, Driven by China's online giants, after 1 to 2 years of data accumulation, the technology of smart speakers and voice assistants will be greatly enhanced. The users are also more familiar with the voice man-machine interface and more relevant products will be seen at that time. On the other hand, Zhang Xiaoping pointed out that the layout of millet in the smart home is the most complete and a complete ecosystem has been established. As soon as the year 2018, a substantial market share growth can be seen.
Baidu is expected to win the Chinese voice assistant market
Extension 墣 Industry Research Institute analyst Lin Zhen 妤 that among the many cloud services in China among the most noteworthy of the layout of Baidu. Baidu's intelligent voice assistant DuerOS, Baidu smart cloud, Baidu brain under the support of two cloud services , A platform that is open platform for developers to provide tools, data and development environment, trying to establish a complete artificial intelligence ecosystem such as Amazon, Google in China (Figure 5).
Figure 5 Takuchi Research Institute analyst Lin Jung-妤 that many of China's cloud service companies, the most noteworthy of the layout of Baidu.
Baidu's attitude is the most positive among the three cloud service providers in China (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent). Baidu shouted at the AI Developers Conference 2017 that "All in AI" slogan announced that it will fully develop its workforce Smart continues to be associated with related market developments and the promotion of DuerOS is one of the key projects in Baidu's AI.
Lin Jung-hwan said that at present, many businesses want to put smart home, smart speaker market, but the profit model has yet to be re-thinking; Baidu's open platform business model with strong competitiveness, promising. Baidu to provide open platform will quickly obtain large amounts of data , And thus optimize the function of DuerOS.The most noteworthy is that at present only through the software update, can be equipped with Amazon Alexa smart appliances in a minute into DuerOS Chinese interface.Therefore, DuerOS not only in China's domestic market Promotion, overseas Chinese can also use this model DuerOS voice assistant service.
In the voice of the man-machine interface in the development process, the use of smart speakers in the home area is only the first step, we must first make smart speakers popularized, consumers will be accustomed to using language to communicate with the machine, then only to develop more The application of voice interface may be.