With the efforts of traditional home appliance manufacturers, communication manufacturers, Internet companies and intelligent hardware manufacturers, the market for smart home in China is rapidly warming up and the industry gradually ushers in the outbreak, but at the same time, the current smart home industry is still facing the problems of manufacturers' independent platforms, products Difficult for interoperability and many other bottlenecks and deficiencies, experts believe that the relevant enterprises still need to open the next interactive interface, expanding cooperation between manufacturers, the integration of hardware and software, emphasis on consumer experience, thereby promoting smart home products to better access to millions of households.
Into the industry to chase the wisdom of the family outlet
In recent years, smart home has become the focus of development for many enterprises such as home appliances and smart hardware. Domestic and foreign giants and emerging start-ups compete in this field. With Google, Apple, Samsung, and domestic Haier, Huawei and BAT as the leaders A large number of enterprises are active in this market layout.
In the domestic boom of smart home, traditional home appliance enterprises are regarded as one of the main promoters, such as home appliance manufacturer Haier introduced U + smart living operating system in 2014 and UHomeOS smart home exclusive operating system by the end of 2016. On November 28, Haier also released The smart home industry's first artificial intelligence solutions.In addition, Haier has also jointly launched a number of manufacturers Haier U + Smart Family '+ AI Family' program.With the active development of home appliance manufacturers, large home appliances in the home position and role Something has changed, and traditional appliances like refrigerators, TVs and washing machines are all becoming smarter.
It is at the cusp of LeTV recently released a notice that the controlling subsidiary of LeTV to be changed to the name of the new music as the new intellectual Electronic Technology (Tianjin) Co., Ltd., the future, the new music as a smart home Internet platform operators will become Business, to smart big screen as the center, integrating intelligent hardware and smart home, to create a smart home.
Many communications equipment companies, intelligent hardware vendors are also competing to enter the smart home strategy.In March this year, Fijian, a network equipment company announced the opening of a smart home strategic transformation, and recently introduced to the outside world a series of intelligent hardware products.
Gu Fuping, Founder and CEO of Fiji, told reporters that the concept of smart home is beginning to gradually take off in China. Some home appliance manufacturers, telecommunications companies and a number of emerging Internet companies have started to trigger the market with single products. With these single Listing one after another will stimulate consumer demand for all areas of the smart home.
From the point of sale of home appliances point of view, smart home appliances in recent years, the growth rate significantly.Reporters learned from Shanghai Suning, the current trend of consumer spending more smart home this year, the industry was also regarded as the first year of the popularity of intelligent appliances to air-conditioning For example, from the consumption structure of the Suning system, direct sales of WiFi air-conditioning sales rose from 40% in the first quarter of last year to 70% this year.This intelligent application not only appeared in air conditioners, also appeared in refrigerators, washing machines , Kitchen appliances and other fields.
'In addition to the popularity of smart TVs such as color TV and other consumer electronics almost 100%, Suning channel air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines and other smart white smart products have increased from 35% to 60%, and the speed is accelerating.' Shanghai Suning Fan Zhijun, general manager .
Voice Assistant opened the industry new blue ocean
To experts, following the wave of smart homes, many home automation devices, sweeping robot, player, stereo, smart socket and other products are beginning to adopt a variety of human-interaction modes (through handheld device / voice / video) Let this type of intelligent products truly into life.Among them, the voice assistant has been confirmed as the interface of the next generation of human-machine communication, with a more intuitive mode of communication and intelligent control, will bring a better life for users And work experience.
According to the research director of TuoZhong Industry Research Institute, XieYuShanshan introduces that strengthening interaction is one of the ways in which the concept of smart home can be integrated into life. In the future, all kinds of equipment in the house have the opportunity to directly build the voice communication ability .At present, the world's four major audio assistant leaders Amazon , Google, Microsoft and Apple, as well as many Chinese manufacturers have successively invested in the development of voice assistant.
'Manufacturers have been devoted to the development of voice assistants in the hope of upgrading their products for human-computer interaction or becoming the concatenation of more services with voice assistants in the future.' 'Xie Yushan said voice control has been gradually implemented in 2017 Products, no matter which voice control system the equipment manufacturer chooses, it has been confirmed that voice control will be one of the important man-machine interfaces in the future smart home because voice is the most intuitive human behavior through questions and answers and requests Device control and management will be the trend.
In this regard, Gu Guoping told reporters that intelligent speaker products in the domestic hot this year, because it has a strong human-computer interaction capabilities, the future is expected to become a smart home entrance. To this end, Fiji News also plans to launch its smart speaker products in the near future.
In response to the current frenzy of smart home and artificial intelligence boom, CTL CTO Zhu Caizhi believes that at the technical level, due to the breakthrough of deep learning technology, which greatly promoted the development of artificial intelligence itself and integration with the industry process.At present, most of the world's artificial AI companies are looking for AI scenarios, because AI is empowering all sectors is its greatest value, including the basic necessities of human beings, smart home is one of the main scenarios of artificial intelligence applications in AI after the popularity of AI will be the depth Into the integration, such as in the interaction level, can be achieved through voice recognition.
Interoperability and other bottlenecks still hack
Although the smart home market currently looks like a booming market, but can not be ignored, behind the hustle and bustle, many products market sales and customer satisfaction is not ideal, the real burst of money recognized by consumers is still limited products, which also To some extent, the concept of smart home into the 'not good to cry' predicament.
Shao Yang, President of Strategic Marketing of Huawei Consumer Business Group, pointed out that the traditional home appliance enterprises face four major obstacles to their smart home: First, many home appliances have not yet achieved networking capabilities; secondly, in order to realize smart control, various products have introduced mobile phone software, but users Do not want to install too much software; again, the products are incompatible with each other, interoperability is difficult to achieve; Finally, but also face some brutal invasion of Internet companies.
Xie Yushan believes that the current smart home market seems to be difficult to have explosive growth, the main reason is still as follows: manufacturers stand-alone platform, product diversity, the use of interface chaos and user experience can not maintain continuity, resulting in the user's equipment is not easy to expand and management inconvenience .
As smart home scenarios evolve, many developers tend to underestimate the difficulty of hardware development, many ideas and ideas that they want to practice often suffer setbacks in the hardware development process, including technical difficulties such as getting Products can be connected to the network, we must go through a large number of certification and testing, a series of prerequisite steps required to make vendors scaring off; or product development chip, often have to pay high license fees to develop their own IC to bear the cost more Is scary and so on.
'Smart home marketing is not as successful as imagined, in the final analysis is still very fragmented and a high degree of diversity' Xie said that although the past there are many alliances set up (mostly led by chip makers), but the alliance among the manufacturers will still have Many home systems and the imagination of the use of the situation, so even if the alliance was established or standards set out to solve this problem, but still difficult to change in a short period of time.In addition, although the wisdom of the family for individual and individual families to customize needs, However, the problems caused by the technical aspects of products and the diversity of system operations make the consumers' experiences at home disrupted and lack of continuity, which only adds troubles to the consumers.
To this end, Xie Yushan suggested that the smart home industry next need to further expand the cooperation of vendors (such as strategic alliances), open interactive interface (API Internet), build standards organizations and integration of hard and soft, complete cloud environment, return to the consumer experience.
'Smart home is the most important intelligent home hardware linkage, combined with cloud platform, application services to the user to bring a good intelligence experience.' Experts say the business alone can not meet all the needs of users intelligent home market intelligence The need for all sectors of the industry with an open mind to build a complete ecology, so that different manufacturers of intelligent hardware devices through the organic connection to achieve interoperability, so as to provide users with a more complete and convenient smart life experience.