In the past two years, smart speakers have become popular in the United States, and their sales have been impressive. After last year's amazing sales of 30 million units by Amazon Echo, the Apple HomePod smart speaker that was just launched in February of this year has successfully won 3% of U.S. market share. .
However, it has been considered by the world as a Chinese market with huge potential for consumption, but it has fallen into an awkward situation in the field of smart speakers. So far, there has not been a single smart speaker product with a single product sales volume exceeding 10 million units.
Li Haibo, the Vice President of the Himalayas once said: 'Only within one kilometer of Nanshan District in Shenzhen, there are 112 companies doing voice intelligence. 'There are so many companies doing smart speakers, but companies that really become product users are few and far between. Little, no domestic company has ever copied the myth of Echo.
Obviously, for smart hardware, there is no sales, all are empty talks. Someone once used such a phrase to describe the current domestic smart speaker market: The industry explosion turned into a tasteless chicken.
Ice and Fire Two-Day Chinese-American Market
Since the previous year, the intelligent speaker has been battling between giants in Silicon Valley.
In 2016, Google launched Google Home, and the Cortana smart speaker Invoke co-developed by Microsoft and Harman Karton was also released last year. Immediately afterwards, Apple said it would launch the HomePod speaker, but in the end it was still dominated by Amazon.
In 2017, the sales of the Amazon smart speaker Echo were outstanding. According to a set of aggregate data released by consulting firm Cirp in January 2018, by the end of 2017, there were more than 40 million smart speakers in use in the United States, among which Amazon Accounted for 30 million.
In China, the smart speaker battle between giants has also been fierce: Baidu's small degree at home, Alibaba's Lynx Elves, Xiaomi's love speaker, Jingdong's bass speaker, and so on are all on the scene. New product launches are successively opened. .
The story of smart speakers has also been heard more and more beautiful: Become a traffic portal, build an ecological platform, and even become a smart home terminal... The smart speaker industry has been extremely lively in these two years.
However, looking at the development of the smart speaker industry in the past two years in the country, it is too early to call it a “air outlet.” More carnival is being launched between giants and startup companies, and feedback from users A lot of calm. Even if it is a foreign star product - Amazon echo also appeared in the country is not satisfied with the phenomenon of soil and water, compared with foreign sales, can only be said to be unsatisfactory.
According to the GFK China’s “China Smart Speaker Market Analysis” report, the domestic sales volume of smart speakers was only about 1,000 units in 2015 and increased to 60,000 units in 2016. From January to October in 2017, the entire domestic market Smart speaker sales have also just over 100,000 units in total.
Until the double eleventh, smart speakers achieved a breakthrough in sales of 1.5 million units. However, compared to Amazon's 30 million data, there is still a big gap.
Domestic open price war, want to enter the market to prepare to burn 1.5 billion
In July last year, Xiaomi released the first artificial AI smart speaker 'Little Love Classmate', priced at 299 yuan, known as the 'price butcher', which also opened the door to price war.
At that time, Tmall just released the Lynx X1 at a price of 499 yuan, Jingdong's smart speaker Jingdong A3 was priced at 599 yuan, and the Chinese version of Echo's Rokid Pebble (monthly stone) was officially sold at 1399 yuan by Lynx. , And other foreign countries have listed Amazon Echo, Google Home, etc. are in more than a thousand dollars, in contrast to the sharp price, millet smart speaker's price has become a killer to get users.
Then, Ali and JD started preparations for a grand price war on the eve of the 21st. They attempted to seize the market through the double festivals. During the double eleventh period, Ali's Tmall Elves dropped to a low price of 99 yuan. The promotional price of the speaker is as low as 49 yuan. This low-cost promotion also brings obvious results.
The low prices reflect the bloody wars of the incoming companies in the burning of money and subsidies. But now, artificial intelligence speakers are still in the stage of nurturing the market, which is the so-called 'money-burning period': high cost and low price. Still occupying the entrance of the track.
Feng Xin, chairman and CEO of Storm Group, said: To occupy the smart speaker market, we must first prepare to burn 1.5 billion in 3 years.
Last year, Alan Baba’s director, Xue Xue, once said in an interview: 'My boss (Ma Yun) told me that I must rely on me to make money without even paying utility bills. Currently the artificial intelligence speaker market, Still in the state of reclamation. Taking Ali's investment subsidies for smart speakers as an example, its primary purpose is to get the 'admission ticket' to enter smart speakers first. 'Shallow snow believes that the price is just a means of market education. The ability to allow users to recognize is the product experience and services.
In the profit model, the industry currently has two main methods. One is to cut into smart homes with Apple, Xiaomi, and other people asking questions, and to make money through hardware sales. Specifically, they control home entertainment through smart speakers. The smart hub, similar to the consumer's virtual personal assistant, opens up its user's wearable device, the car, and the smart home, etc., and functions as a smart hub.
The other is a giant company that is typical of Ali. Its purpose is mainly to increase the company's GMV (total turnover), and it is intended to be the traffic entrance in the AI era.
It can be seen from Ali’s financial statements in recent years that although there are large growth users from FY2014-FY16, the growth is not obvious. The growth rate of GMV slows down, in addition to the original traffic channels. Ali urgently needs to add fresh traffic channels, which is one of the reasons why Ali will invest heavily.
Technical flaws are difficult to break through: Semantic recognition and Chinese language recognition
Market research firm Gartner analyst Tracy Tsai had made relevant analysis for smart speakers: In the dialogue, some Chinese manufacturers produced equipment with low accuracy in speech recognition, and the overall understanding and response of Chinese natural language is still not mature enough. This is One of the key reasons for hindering popularity.
Related industry expert Xu Fei (a pseudonym) expressed to Tencent Technology: 'Semantic recognition is a pain point in current smart speakers, but it is also a major problem of AI technology. AI can defeat Goesig in Go, but it may not understand everyone now. What are you talking about? '
Smart speaker voice technology can be divided into three stages: noise cancellation, speech recognition, and semantic recognition. Relative to foreign countries, China's level of development in the AI intelligent voice assistant is temporarily in a relatively backward state. And for smart home products For example, the core technology is relying on voice control, behind which is the intelligent recognition ability and deep learning ability of artificial intelligence.
Although there are already certain breakthroughs in related technologies in China, companies such as HKUST and SBI are all capable of voice recognition. However, at present, domestic smart speaker manufacturers do not have the platform advantage of artificial intelligence. Like Amazon, Google's ability to integrate resources across multiple vertical domains.
For example, 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 building an open platform based on voice products based on Alexa voice software. Shawn DuBravac, the chief economist of Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organizer of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), once said: 'Now, there are now about 1,500 products equipped with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.'
In addition, apart from the reasons for technical strength, the main problem of semantic recognition is the complex Chinese language environment.
Currently, the AI speakers in the market only support Chinese Mandarin interactions, which are different from the human environment in China. The actual situation is not as simple as imagined: China has a vast area and diverse dialects. According to incomplete statistics, they can only communicate with each other. There are more than 80 dialects.
Even though Putonghua has been popular for decades, as of today, there are still many people who do not speak Putonghua, and the “pseudo-Putonghua” with many dialects is even more plentiful. In terms of context, it is also not conducive to machine learning and big data. Mobile phones. Compared to foreign smart products, in the development of local smart speakers in China, only in terms of language, it takes several times more research and development effort.
Again, this is a problem with Amazon's move toward local companies: Even if Echo can enter the domestic market, the move to Chinese recognition is enough to make Amazon suffer.
Therefore, due to the fact that smart speaker voice interactions such as speech recognition and semantic interactions in Chinese are not yet mature, they all seriously affect the user experience. In the current transitional stage, improving the performance of speaker headphone products is the most important task for enterprises. And only when the language interaction interface technology is shaped and developed into a standard service, smart speakers are likely to become truly popular in the Chinese market.
There are huge differences in consumer habits between Chinese and foreign users
Looking back at China's smart home industry, compared to foreign companies, it started relatively late. Nowadays, consumer demand for smart homes and buying awareness are still at the initial stage, and their dependence on smart homes is low.
Take the smart lock as an example, the penetration rate in some European, American, Japanese, and Korean countries has reached 60%, but according to relevant data, the use rate of smart locks in China in 2017 is less than 3%. Overall, the lag in the smart home industry is The primary reason for hindering the development of speakers.
In this regard, Xu Fei, an industry insider, said: 'Actually, domestic technology for artificial intelligence has not yet been used. The smart speaker is considered to be a relatively rapid development of the entire AI field. In fact, we can also see a big problem, that is, smart speakers. The core values are not standardized and do not capture the core needs of users. Many people are paying for intelligence rather than sound quality. Overall, the key is not technology, but how to match technology to your life. Requirements, AI needs real applications.
Domestic smart home industry capacity lags behind
In addition to the current low user acceptance of the product, the main problem is that the capacity of smart homes in China is lagging behind. It is difficult to supply a certain amount of products in terms of production capacity, which also increases the difficulty of smart speaker output.
Some media pointed out that from last year’s double 11’s, we can see the issue of smart speakers in terms of capacity. Since the start of the second quarter, Tmall’s elf’s total sales reached 9 million units at 9:00 on the same day, but then the page is sold out. Up until 8pm, Lynx again sold 20,000 units in the form of 'One more thing' to complete the closing. Users found that the shipping date after the purchase of smart speakers was delayed for a long time. Most were November 30 and December 31. A few days ago, it was seen from the side that even Ali was not capable of producing smart speakers, let alone other newcomers who had just entered the game.
From this point of view, not so much about a smart speaker battle, the competition behind it is the incoming company's financial background, AI technology background, resource integration, and market development and many other capabilities.
Nevertheless, there is still an optimistic attitude towards the Chinese market. Recently, Antonio Wang, director of IDC China, predicted that smart speakers are the next major consumer electronics trend in China, and that China is expected to become the second largest smart speaker market after the United States. Antonio Say: 'The 2016 drone was in power, the virtual and augmented reality fever in 2017, and the intelligent speaker in 2018 was the best.'
Will such predictions be realized this year? Will smart speakers be able to achieve the desired results, overcome the current difficulties, and become the next generation of human-computer interaction? We will wait and see.