In intelligent speaker box becomes Internet giant “new favor” after, numerous consumer and manufacturer invest quite much attention to this one domain. Before CES, Google for their own smart speaker some publicity, the domestic small ai speaker’s ultra-low price “loss Shouting” also let the popularity of smart speakers climb. Smart penetration increased by 50 percent from early December to February, and with the success of Amazon’s Echo, smart speakers have almost become standard equipment for Internet giants.
Compared with the overseas boom in the smart speaker market, the sales volume of the Chinese market can be described as dismal. According to GfK data, the sales volume of the domestic smart speaker market was 1.65 million units in 2017, and will reach 5.88 million units in 2018. In contrast, the scale of the United States is 10 million, but the situation has not been opened in China.
Up to now, only Alibaba’s Tmall Genie smart speaker shipments exceeded one million. In the fourth quarter of 2017, data showed that Tmall Genie entered the top three in the world, causing other domestic giants to accelerate the layout.
BAT has entered, coupled with lenovo, IFlytek and Xiaomi and other important players, so that smart speakers in this year more hot. For their part, the giants want to quickly capture homes, innovate in experience, sound quality, craftsmanship, and compete for users through price butcher.
What is the logic behind the giants’ scramble for smart speakers?
All sorts of survey data show, intelligent household market scale is in the next few years, will break through trillion, huge cake attracted numerous players to participate in, also emerge numerous innovation enterprises.
However, to realize smart life, cross-platform and cross-brand connectivity is the foundation. Companies at the core of the industrial chain actively build ecological construction, including Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and Haier’s U+ smart life platform. And Amazon, Google and IFlytek and Baidu use AI voice to empower and cultivate smart home ecology.
In the smart home market consolidation, who can gather more third-party resources, who is engaged to dominate, the amazon in the United States is a successful model, carrying Alexa intelligent speakers much American families welcome, through amazon intelligent speakers can manipulate the family of intelligent equipment, in the battle for the entrance of the smart home, amazon success screens.
According to Kantar, amazon’s Echo has a 66 percent market share, followed by Google’s GoogleHome smart speaker with 30 percent, giving them a virtual monopoly on smart speakers in the U.S.
In China, although the giants have entered, but its products are as prominent as the long board and the short board, there is still a certain distance from the explosion.
Mobile use and wechat access are the main highlights of Tencent listen to official publicity, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie or Baidu’s Xiaodu at home for search and information recognition and other needs, jingdong Ding Dong speaker, can achieve voice interaction, music playback, voice shopping and other functions.
Millet speaker to do smart home connector. Millet is different lie in, it wants to become intelligent household control hub. At present, Xiaomi has invested in 77 smart hardware ecological chain companies, including earphones, power supplies, bracelets, sockets, blood pressure monitors, air purifiers, water purifiers, sports cameras, balance vehicles, batteries, bedside lamps, rice cookers and so on.
In the United States, Echo’s most commonly used scenes include the information source of the bedside and the central control of the kitchen, but in China, these two scenes are not suitable for the national conditions, and the connected smart devices in the home are not rich enough to form a demand. In fact, from another point of view, this itself is a mobile phone can solve the problem, intelligent speaker as intelligent household control center, may be more than the essence of gimmick.
Content is a barrier but does it match the real needs of users?
Smart home competition and content barriers. From the current point of view, the strategy of BAT jingdong and other Internet giants is to pave the way for software content services. That is, what its speakers carry are their own unique software services including music resources and related content resources.
A big part of the content barrier may come from music copyright. The ding Dong speaker, which has access to a large number of audio resources such as Baidu and Kaola, was suddenly unable to call song resources at the end of 2017. The customer service said that “the content of the music library is adjusted, and some resources cannot be listened to temporarily”. The same situation has also happened to Xiaomi speakers. If the primary function of a smart speaker is its music library resources, Tencent, which owns the music copyright library, has an important advantage in this respect.
At present, Internet giants all adopt resource integration, but the difference lies in the form of content supply and the amount of resources. For example, Baidu’s Xiaodu Home is essentially a combination of intelligent speakers, home cameras, tablet computers and Baidu APP.
Tencent Listen to smart speakers through QQ Music, Qgoose FM, Yuewen Group, Penguin Fairy Tales and other product systems, claims to have more than 17 million legitimate music library, one million children’s stories, 100 million hours of audio content, including old people’s favorite storytelling, cross talk, opera and so on.
Amazon has built an open platform for voice-based products based on voice-activated software Alexa. Last year, Amazon sold tens of millions of Alexa-powered smart speaker devices in peak season, creating win-win value with numerous third-party developers and creating ecological value of its own. Baidu DuerOS is doing the same, but the subsequent value release remains to be seen.
The giants position the speaker as the bearer of their own content and traffic, but from another point of view, it is also the giants who are making products based on their own needs. That is, I need users to buy this hardware to digest my massive content and find new incremental space for my content layout, rather than whether the users really have just needs.
While the competition is ostensibly about content barriers, the ability to open up technology, the number of connected devices, and the influence of developers, the competition is essentially about the ability to capture the needs of users, and how to better reflect the value of voice interaction, human-computer interaction, and third-party developers.
For domestic manufacturers, the strategy of educating the market with price war is effective in the short term, but the sales won by this strategy can not drive the future development of the industry, but will overdraw the expectation of users. At present, consumers generally report problems such as poor far-field recognition, high false wake-up rate, unstable continuous dialogue function, poor semantic understanding ability and poor sound quality. In general, there is potential demand in the market. Behind the difficulty in finding popular styles is the result of many manufacturers failing to complete many shortcomings from the technical ecology and the scene of product demand.
The original article was published on November 28, 2018
The author of this article: Technology Cloud report
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