In particular, from the recent smart phone conferences of all the major players present, relative to the previous generation of products, in order to avoid homogenization, various companies entering the market gradually have their own positioning and play.
In this wave of battlefield battles, which one finds the right position, which one will eventually only be 'to accompany the run'? From the battlefields where the major corporations preempt the layout, you can see the clues.
Intelligent speaker market is currently split into two schools: Product performance intelligence VS service intelligence
Today's smart speakers are recognized by the industry as a product that controls the entry level of smart homes.
The main selling point of smart speakers is in their voice human-computer interaction and speaker play content services. Users interact through intelligent speaker voice, so that intelligent speakers perform user requirements.
Let's consider this scenario: When you cook in the kitchen of your home, you can use smart speakers to control the kitchenware, order food, and set the cooking time for meals. At the same time, you can order smart speakers to call friends and relatives to come and eat together. , Or open curtains or adjust the temperature of the home air conditioner, etc., This interactive use makes life more intelligent, Therefore, the performance of smart speakers can not be imagined.
Until now, the giants have attempted to cut through smart speakers and try to occupy the control center of the smart home and seize this entrance as soon as possible. Since last year's Double 11 war, domestic smart speakers have opened the door to the smart speaker market mainly through price wars. , Breakthrough in sales of millions. By this year, major giants have made significant differences in their positioning.
At present, several domestic companies that occupy the market are mainly divided into two modes in terms of strategy: One is Baidu’s small degree at home, Ali’s Tmall’s Elves, Xiaomi’s smart speakers, Jingdong’s speakers are the main ones. The improvement lies in the intelligentization of product performance, which is reflected in its voice, semantic recognition and other hardware technologies. The other is represented by Himalayan Xiaoya speakers, which is mainly embodied in the content service platforms played by speakers and recommended by the algorithm. Intelligent content and services.
From the perspective of domestic development, although smart speaker products still remain in the initial stage of exploration, after the initial exploration of last year, the smart speaker market has already begun to take shape, waiting for this year's major product 'opening screen' and For this reason, Tencent Technology makes inventory and analysis of each product that is mainly entered.
Baidu's small degree at home: Join the display screen, higher overall performance
Last month, Baidu announced that its smart speakers were small at home and was identified as a product that supports video, audio, and search functions. Baidu Chairman Li Yanhong said: 'Little home is a new species, a new species, Represents a new direction. 'Small degree of multi-party video call at home, 'a call that is', you can achieve efficient video calls, and also remote monitoring, voice photography, fun encyclopedia, daily voice reminding and other functions.
Judging from the entire structure, although the smallness is called a smart speaker at home, it has to be said that the small speaker added to the display screen is more like a smart TV or a smart monitor.
This home with a small display screen, is mainly a collection of AI algorithm performance, play Baidu advantage in the search, through the smart speaker display can enter Baidu massive search portal.
Relevant industry experts commented on this point: The small degree at home has a great advantage in this step of the display. Although this kind of hardware form is in fact nothing new, but from the sense of experience, smart speakers plus touch screen, after the camera, Compared with the advantages of ordinary speakers in interaction, the screen is efficient, intuitive and vivid in the presentation of information and the consequent convenience and additional functions (such as broadcast video, video call, etc.), which is a single force in the sound content The interaction is unmatched.
From this point of view, the smaller positioning of homes at home is to create a more efficient and comprehensive smart home product in terms of performance, and gradually break away from the single voice-centered voice interaction.
Alibaba's Lynx Elves: The market is given priority in the children and the elderly
Last month, Alibaba released the AliGenie artificial intelligence system version 2.0, a new generation of smart speakers - 'Tyro cat fire eyes'.
The upgraded Tmall Genie and its built-in system will add visual recognition capabilities to the original voice interaction capabilities, enabling visual cognition, multimodal interaction and situational awareness. Alibaba said that the newly released T The emphasis is not on the extension of the screen, but on the ability of 'visual perception'. We hope to visually recognize and understand the world around us, and combine the operational capabilities of the 'machine' to help the user.
From a market positioning point of view, the Lynx Elves are mainly for children and elderly people with poor eyesight. It is understood that the Lynx Elves can identify 117 sets of children's books (direct audio reading) through image recognition and can combine intelligent voice interactions. Voices are read to help them read and literate. For elderly people with poor eyesight, the Elves have the ability to identify the pillbox. As long as they scan the pillbox with fire eyes, they can broadcast drug names, efficacy, and expiration dates. Information, ability to identify more than 40,000 kits.
For young people, Tmall Elf mainly develops a visual system based on 3D avatars that can provide more than 20 kinds of natural interactive mimicking animations.
Objectively, the further improvement of the Ali Tmall Elves is mainly in terms of hardware performance, and it does not exert its advantage of relying on Ali in e-commerce. At present, Tmall's sales breakthrough is mainly due to the price war. Last year Double 11 as an example, Ali's Tmall Genius smart speakers dropped to 99 yuan, breaking millions in sales.
Jingdong's smart speakers: Relying on the news of the University of Science and Technology, gaining a reputation for hardware
As early as 2015, Jingdong took the lead of HKUST, and the two parties jointly established Beijing Linglong Technology Co., Ltd. 叮咚 The smart speaker was the first product launched by the company. In terms of hardware building, the 叮咚 speaker relied on the flight of HKUST. Get the 'natural word of mouth' in this area.
In September last year, Jingdong's second-generation intelligent speaker products were officially sold at Jingdong Mall. The price was RMB 799. The 2nd generation product was Jingdong's 7th smart speaker product, integrating voiceprint recognition and adjustment. Voice TTS (speech synthesis) and other features, compared to the smart speaker products that appeared on the market at the time, the biggest feature of the 叮咚 speaker is the three latest features of custom wake-up words, screen voice double interaction and dial the phone.
In January of this year, Jingdong smart speaker's latest product, 叮咚Play, debuted at the CES show. In addition to the performance improvements of many new features such as video calling and face recognition, the new 叮咚Play also features an 8-inch LCD screen. Is the first smart speaker in the field of Chinese smart speakers equipped with a large screen.
Millet smart speakers: The main cost-effective, laying the IoT ecosystem to occupy the market
During the rice noodles festival held this month, the mini speaker mini was released for sale and the price was adjusted from 169 yuan to 99 yuan. The 99 yuan rice flour festival promotional price boosted its booking volume to more than 1 million units. In the case of Alibaba Sengyi last year, Ali sales were also looming over Ali's momentum. According to the report of Zhiyi West Media, Xiaomi has already thrown 1 million orders for Xiaoxiao Speaker mini. It is expected that Xiaomi will produce more than 5 million units this year. Smart speaker.
In the name of mini, compared with the previous product, the mini speaker mini is about the size of the palm, and always maintains the style of the millet product: affordable, cost-effective. Little love speaker mini support check message, voice memo, calendar management, Life assistant, access to music and audio books, and can control home appliances, including smart lights, smart accessories, sweeping robots, air purifiers, air conditioners, televisions, etc.
For users, the low cost of the 169 yuan mini speaker mini allows more users to accept new attempts to smart home solutions, industry experts commented that the low price of mini speaker mini is more to achieve The penetration rate in user use is also conducive to the integration of Xiaomi LoT ecological chain.
Himalayan Xiaoya Smart Speaker: Provides intelligent and more accurate and rich content services
The Himalayan started from a domestic audio sharing platform, and now it is a smart speaker that crosses the border. Compared to Xiaomi and Ali’s smart speakers, the style and intelligence are different.
The Himalayan does not have the advantages of technology and hardware design. Therefore, it chooses to cooperate with some excellent manufacturers and inject its own massive and high-quality content resources on the hardware carrier so that its own products can quickly realize differentiated market positioning. It can be said that A very smart approach.
The Xiaoya smart speaker was released in June last year. It is not so much a smart speaker. To be precise, it is more like a smart and audio library. The smart speaker is based on the support of the Himalayan audio platform and is rich in content. Its intelligence is mainly reflected in the audio content it plays. For example, after all voice recognition, the user will display the recognition result in the smart speaker's APP. If the user has energy, it can help correct the accuracy of the recognition. After many adjustments, Xiaoya’s chips will record your behavioral characteristics. After more and more preferences are chosen for the records, they will provide users with more and more accurate content.
Next Steps for Smart Speakers: Focus on Powerful Content Services and Usage Scenarios
On the whole, the current smart speaker market is still in a competitive state of price war. It is far away from the smart speakers like the Amazon Echo.
From the sales point of view, such a gap can be intuitively seen. Amazon Echo sold 30 million units in the past year. However, in China so far, there has been no explosive smart speaker with a single product sales volume exceeding 10 million units.
However, analogous to the 30% family ownership of smart speakers in the United States, the smart speaker market in China is still very large, and smart speakers are still in the eve of a big eruption.
An industry insider, Xu Fang (a pseudonym), who is the director of public relations for a smart speaker company, told Tencent Technology: “There is a big problem in the domestic smart speaker market. It is also a phenomenon of misunderstandings. It is the expectation of the smart speaker. Too high, the definition of intelligent imagination is greater than the current level of development of smart speakers. In addition, the current smart speaker playback content and services, did not seize the real needs of users, the overall market situation '尴尬'.
Specifically, there is no obvious echelon gap in the hardware technology of smart speakers currently available on the market. From the perspective of business strategy, hardware development is a long-term exploration process, and in order to seize the entrance, grasp To live in the user market, it is necessary to make efforts in terms of content services and usage scenarios. In this way, users can be more quickly moved and occupy the market, achieving economies of scale.
1. Content Service: After entering the subdivided area, it gradually becomes personalized, and the giant will have more advantages.
Li Haibo, the Vice President of Himalayan, once said: 'Whether it is the intelligence of performance or the intellectualization of content, the development of smart speaker is following a logic: The smart speaker is mainly used to connect people and information equipment to meet the user's various types of equipment. Demand. Essentially, the competitive core of smart speakers is the content and services provided by the speakers. With regard to the next development of smart speakers, personalization may be the first stage.
The smart speaker can customize and optimize the user's personalized speech recognition model according to the user's pronunciation habits, and often say the content, so that the user's interaction success rate is higher. At the same time, through the analysis of the user's interaction data behavior and hobby, to build a corresponding User portraits, personalized push.
According to statistics from the Himalayan Institute of Statistics (as shown in the figure above), in the category of listening popularity rankings, vocal novels topped the list, becoming the largest category of mobile audio. At the same time, data show that high-frequency users in audio books In average, the average length of listening time per person per day exceeds 113 minutes. Children's class, music class, variety entertainment class, comic dialogue story class 2 to 5 places.
It can be seen that the current users' core demands for audio content mainly focus on audio fiction, children's stories, music and entertainment, as well as the elderly enthusiasts' comic dialogues. The service content of smart speakers can be built around these major aspects.
It is worth mentioning that, if you want to build an intelligent content service platform, the giant company obviously has a greater advantage, and it also brings a lot of pressure to the startup companies in the industry.
From the perspective of music content alone, because most of the music copyright in China is basically in the hands of Tencent, Alibaba, and NetEase, other manufacturers of smart speakers need to buy second-hand copyrights. And record companies like Sony license to Internet companies. When music rights are copyrighted, they are only authorized to be played on the APP. They are not compliant with other products, and they also lay a hidden danger for the mass shipment of smart speaker market in the future.
But on the other hand, such conditional restrictions also bring greater advantages and opportunities for the giants such as Tencent Ali. After all, the giants have many resources and the financial strength is strong. If they control the entrances and channels again, they will be able to Touch the user, thus taking the lead in occupying the entrance.
2, the use of the scene has a broader exploration space
From the use of scenes to distinguish, smart speaker is currently mainly used in indoor, outdoor and in the three major categories of vehicle use scenarios.
In indoor use, smart speakers are mainly used for the interaction between living services and smart homes, such as allowing them to play music and audiobooks, query weather and news hotspots, and control home lighting, curtains, air conditioners, refrigerators and other household products. There are also service functions such as ordering, online shopping, and taxi.
In the outdoor scene, for users who like sports, such as hip-hop enthusiasts or square dancers, speakers can be connected to wearable devices on the user's body. Even in a noisy outdoor environment, the wearable device can be controlled by the user's gestures and body sensations. For example, a smart speaker automatically plays a suitable piece of music. When the user jumps for 20 minutes, the heart rate and calorie consumption have reached a stage. The speaker prompts to slow down. At the same time, the user is instructed to do stretching exercises. During the entire exercise, the user Have a better smart experience.
In the car scene, smart speakers are mainly used to cooperate with car manufacturers, through the speaker to achieve the instructions given to the car. For example, in the cold weather, the user said at home to drive the car's 'air conditioning to 25 degrees', then get on the car Before the air conditioning temperature has been automatically adjusted. In addition, through the voice control can also be achieved by allowing the car to play music or news, to set the alarm clock and timer functions.
It has to be said that the cooperation between smart speakers and car manufacturers is an excellent entrance into the car scene. Today, intelligence has become the 'on-going' of the automotive industry, and the imagination of the 'live on the car' has been continuously expanded.
Nowadays, more and more vehicle manufacturers are realizing that artificial intelligence is indispensable for the development of autonomous driving and connected cars. The voice recognition of smart speakers has a high affinity with cars, if they can voice control navigation systems and music players, Without the need to leave the steering wheel with both hands, you do not need to stare at the display, you can safely control the vehicle equipment.
In July last year, Toyota invested in start-up companies through an artificial intelligence research and development subsidiary in Silicon Valley in the United States. The development of artificial intelligence will probably affect the competitiveness of automobiles. Major car companies are stepping up development.
Just a few days ago, the Lions Zhiyun system was announced at the Chery smart brand conference. Chery introduced many intelligent features of the Tiggo 8, equipped with the Apollo robot system, and demonstrated to the audience. The new human-car interactive experience based on Baidu AI technology. Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery Automobile Co., Ltd., realized the function of opening and closing the car trunk by means of voice input through the remote Baidu speaker on his desk. The key to interoperability between the car scene and the home scene.
Of course, for the smart speaker exploration model, it is not possible to single out bets on cooperation with car manufacturers. Related industry experts believe that in the future the major incoming companies will pursue double-line exploration in the exploration of smart speakers. Because if you want Winning most of the market, through a single cooperation with car manufacturers, the frontline will be too long. If you independently build another car speaker and access high-quality service content, you can directly enter the market to occupy the market.
Nowadays, smart speakers are erupting and popularization, and are deeply immersed in a 'blood of blood'. Although there is still a long way from reaching maturity, such an environment is also left for the 'players' who want to enter the stadium. The time to fully seize the entrance, and further promote the smart speaker market to further eruption.
For the players who are now entering the smart speaker market, they want to win. In addition to the constant change of product hardware, the choice of content services and marketing strategies has become the key to success.