Some time ago, the use and evaluation videos of various brands of smart speakers released by the majority of user groups once occupied major long and short video websites, and the smart speakers in the video are almost omnipotent, from molesting to cursing, serious to naughty, It is indeed eye-catching.
With these "tap water" assists, coupled with the tireless publicity and competition of various brand manufacturers, the smart speaker market has quickly formed a huge outlet, and many startups and giants that have not yet entered the market have a huge interest in this. fantasy. However, with the passage of time, the development of smart speakers seems to be a little powerless, and now it is more like an out-of-date Internet celebrity who has lost the favor of fans.
There are many players in the smart speaker market, and the wanton entry is really a beach landing for the traffic entrance?
When it comes to the popularity of the domestic smart speaker industry, it is actually largely influenced by overseas markets. According to the smart speaker industry report for the first quarter of 2018 released by market research firm StrategyAnalyTIcs, Google Home shipments reached 2.4 million units in the first quarter, a year-on-year increase of 709%, accounting for 26.5% of the market share; Amazon Echo series smart speakers The shipment volume was 4 million units, a year-on-year increase of 102%, accounting for 43.6% of the market share.
It is not difficult to see that the combined market share of the two giants Google and Amazon has reached as much as 70%, which can be said to have achieved a monopoly in the smart speaker market. And almost never stopped. However, recently, the number of powerful players in the smart speaker market has gradually increased, and the market pattern seems to be broken.
As far as the international giants who have entered the smart speaker market are concerned, many leaders in their respective fields are among them. In February 2018, Apple released the smart speaker HomePod. Although it is not as perfect as expected, it is outstanding in terms of sound quality and other aspects. It is also deeply loved by fruit fans; in September, when Samsung released the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone in New York, it first showed its smart speaker product Galaxy Home; in October, Facebook also released a portable touch screen called "Portal". smart speakers.
On the other hand, in the domestic market, giants in various fields have also devoted themselves to it. Among them, there are many large home appliance manufacturers and many peripheral enterprises, such as Haier, Midea, Mobvoi, Himalaya, Kugou, etc., all of which have self-developed products. According to incomplete statistics, there are currently nearly 50 domestic companies that release smart speaker products, and at least 500 related hardware companies or technology providers are active in the market. To say that the main explosive products in the current domestic smart speaker market are mainly dominated by several leading Internet companies and smart hardware manufacturers.
Judging from the time line of the domestic smart speaker market, in 2015, JD.com and iFLYTEK launched the Dingdong smart speaker, becoming the first company to test the waters of China's smart speaker market; on July 5, 2017, Ali launched Tmall Elf X1; on July 26, Xiaomi released AI speaker Xiaoai; on November 16, Baidu released the first smart speaker ravenH; on March 27, 2018, Xiaomi launched Xiaoai speaker mini; on April 17, Tencent Tencent TingTing speaker was launched on JD.com. On May 9, Ali launched a new smart speaker Tmall Elf Sugar Cube; on May 10, JD.com released Dingdong mini2; On March 30, Huawei released its first AI speaker, and on November 1, Baidu upgraded the Xiaodu speaker again and released the Xiaodu smart speaker Pro...
It is not difficult to see that domestic smart speakers are in a period of intensive sales. Major manufacturers such as BAT, JD.com, Xiaomi, and Huawei have not lost their momentum in chasing smart speakers. In just one year, it has had a huge impact on the global smart speaker market. Domestic core companies such as Alibaba and Xiaomi have become rising stars that influence the market.
According to data released by Canalys, in the first quarter of 2018, the shipments of Ali's Tmall Genie and Xiaomi's Xiaoai speakers exceeded 1 million and 600,000 units respectively, ranking third or fourth in the global market, second only to Google and Amazon. In the second quarter, Alibaba's shipments of 3 million units and Xiaomi's 2 million units remained in the third and fourth positions, followed by Apple and JD.com. The millions-level success has given the domestic market a ticket to smart speakers. According to data from the China Business Industry Research Institute, China's smart speaker market will reach 330 million yuan in 2018. Analysts at home and abroad agree that China's smart speaker market has unlimited potential and is expected to overtake the United States in the future.
Although such a sudden emergence has established a certain position on the international stage, it has also added more uncertainties. Even for the core giants, it is difficult to accurately predict the next trend of the smart speaker market. However, this does not seem to affect the crazy idea of ​​many manufacturers entering the game. The reason is actually not difficult to find. On the one hand, smart speakers involve a wide range of fields, and it is easy to find entry points and breakthroughs, such as single products and platforms; It is due to the gradual maturity of the relevant industrial chain that the experience threshold of the entire industry has been lowered, and everyone has the opportunity to get a share of it. However, among them, there are also some manufacturers who are "forced to enter the game" and have to devote themselves to it under the pressure of profit and market layout, and some enter the mobile phone in order to increase the stickiness of the original users. Smart speaker terminal.
In the context of the unique scene status of this revolutionary new species of artificial intelligence, smart speakers are known as the traffic portal of the next generation of human-computer interaction. Occupying the entrance is undoubtedly a great temptation for all enterprises. One of the entrances is to cut in and occupy the control center of the smart home through the smart speaker, and seize the "entrance" of the smart home.
The concept of smart home is not unfamiliar to us. Since 2014, various hardware products related to smart home have been emerging. Smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart door locks and other novel products emerge in an endless stream, but to put it bluntly, smart The core of it is nothing more than voice interaction. As we all know, as one of the oldest and primitive information communication methods of human beings, speech is inherently possessed of media advantages for content dissemination. Visual information can directly express the innate advantages of opinions and ideas, and it is more vivid and vivid.
Looking at most of the smart speakers on the market today, they basically advertise that they can provide Internet services such as information inquiry, takeaway, shopping, and scene-based smart home control on the basis of content services such as music, audiobooks, and encyclopedias. , such as controlling curtains, TVs, air conditioners, lights, refrigerator temperature, etc., it sounds full of technology, quite like the prototype of "Jarvis" in "Iron Man".
It is foreseeable that as more and more connected devices are installed in the home, smart speakers are bound to become one of the largest segments of the Internet of Things in the next decade. In such a huge market, if the smart speaker can really become the "control center" of the smart home in the future, the value it contains is self-evident. However, the development of smart homes is not yet mature, and smart speakers have just started. It is still difficult to make great achievements in this trillion-level market.
From price wars to technical difficulties, smart speakers suffered "Waterloo"?
Behind the contention of a hundred schools of thought, smart speakers seem to be very hot, but they are indeed like a flash in the pan. After the glory of the past, they are constantly dying. Although there are still manufacturers who continue to launch new products, for users, it has gradually disappeared. Losing the expectation and freshness of the product, the pain points of the industry development began to appear one by one.
Judging from the development history of most Internet industries, price war is a necessary stage for almost every industry, and it is also the stage that can test the vitality of enterprises the most. , and only companies that can survive can be qualified to talk about profitability, and the smart speaker market is no exception. After experiencing the "hundred boxes war" scene in 2017, a new round of price wars for smart speakers has escalated again.
Judging from the current trend of falling prices of smart speaker products, it has entered a white-hot state, from 89 yuan Ali Fangtang to 79 yuan Jingdong Dingdong mini2 and 79 yuan Xiaodu smart speakers, the bottom line of the price of smart speakers It has been repeatedly broken, and the low-priced products of various brands have successfully pulled the price of smart speakers into the battlefield within 100 yuan.
Although when the cost of early adopters is low enough, it can indeed stimulate the willingness of users to purchase experience. However, the low market price has also brought a lot of pain to various smart speaker manufacturers. As a result, low prices mean continuously compressed profits, which also leads manufacturers to follow the trend of low-price strategies without more energy. In terms of content quality and technology upgrades, the resulting product quality problems and homogenization problems will become more serious, and if you do not participate in the price war, you will lose a large number of users due to excessive selling prices and unintelligent systems, and you will fall into A vicious circle that cannot be sold and cannot learn to grow. The smart speaker ravenH, which was once launched by Baidu, is a good example.
Second, the strategy of educating the market based on price war can indeed be effective in the short term, but the sales volume brought by the low price strategy cannot drive the future development of the industry, but only rely on the shrinking of hardware to preempt the market. , it will also lead to a long-term vicious cycle of low profit, low cost, and low quality, and gradually overdraft users' expectations, so that even when manufacturers launch better and smarter speakers in the future, it is difficult for them to be willing to try again. . This point can be seen from the recently launched Dingdong Mini2. Even if the first purchase price of this product hits 79 yuan, there is no shortage of hard-to-find goods. It can be seen that the effect of the price war is limited. .
Among them, there are also some manufacturers who are purely “losing money and making a profitâ€. Without reducing the quality of products, they pay their own money to participate in the game of price wars. Although it seems a little difficult to understand, it is difficult for some giant manufacturers with deep capital to come to the market. It is enough to say that it is enough to achieve such a goal. After all, if a competitor dies, there will be less potential threat. As for the funds that have been lost in the early stage, it has long been accustomed to it.
In addition to the external forces brought about by the price war, the reasons for the "fall out of favor" in the smart speaker industry are also internal reasons for its own technical problems. Although today's smart speakers have a beautiful appearance, their internal functions are basically the same. The essence is to move the voice assistant on the mobile phone to the speaker. The so-called intelligence can also be said to be the most basic performance in the field of artificial intelligence. form.
It is worth mentioning that most of the smart speakers on the market seem to have forgotten the word "speaker" in it, and they only constantly seek breakthroughs in "intelligence", ignoring the improvement of sound quality, and according to the user's use of speakers. Judging from the feedback during the product process, the experience of "intelligence" is not satisfactory. There are generally problems such as difficulty in far-field recognition, high false awakening rate, unstable continuous dialogue function, and poor semantic understanding ability. Among them, children's mode is the main one. Smart speakers are also unrecognizable because children's articulation is unclear, and they are far from reaching the user's psychological threshold in all aspects.
In the final analysis, it is because my country's artificial intelligence technology is still in the stage of weak AI, many intelligence and voice technologies are not mature enough, and artificial intelligence itself is a field of slow work and meticulous work. The combination of competitive attributes and artificial intelligence technology seems to be a bit out of tune. Perhaps, the smart speaker industry has not been "cool" until the AI ​​technology has matured.
High-end intelligence is not a toy, can "Jarvis" be reborn?
It is not difficult to see from the above that the smart speaker market is facing many problems from internal and external troubles. How to restore the hearts of users has become the top priority of major manufacturers. Only oneself knows the suffering of superficial prosperity. Today, the window period of smart speakers has passed, and how the major manufacturers develop in the field of voice assistants and ecosystems in artificial intelligence determines who can win this wave of competition.
For enterprises, the biggest imaginary space contained in smart speakers is still the role of "entrance". As far as the entrance to smart homes is concerned, a report released by the well-known market research institution StrategyAnalyTIcs pointed out that smart homes will become a further step in the Internet of Things in 2020. The key to development, when the number of connections will reach 50 billion. And as part of the share of deployed IoT devices, smart home devices will overtake smartphones in 2021. It can be seen that the rapid development of the Internet of Things is making people usher in the era of the Internet of Everything. As an emerging thing, smart home has been emerging in recent years and has become a hot spot in the industry.
The ideal smart home ecology is not just about the intelligence of a single piece of hardware, nor is it just simple control of home appliances through mobile APPs. Instead, all types of home appliances are on the same platform to realize the state of interconnection and mutual control, and through different household products, they can bring users a more complete experience in life, health, medical care and other aspects.
However, in the current smart home system, most of the home appliances are still in a state of being separated from each other, and it is rare to see that all the home appliances in the family are all products under one brand. If you want to become the core entrance of smart home through smart speakers, you need to form a closed loop of smart home ecosystem. Now Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple and other hardware manufacturers are constantly moving in this direction. This also makes the future market competition no longer limited to the product function of the smart speaker, but transformed into a competition for more resources and a test of integration capabilities.
For Internet manufacturers such as Ali and JD.com, they also use smart speakers as a traffic scene entrance. According to industry insiders, the reason why Amazon originally launched the Echo may be simply to expand a sales channel. The fundamental purpose is to attract users to shop. For Ali and JD.com, they also want to revitalize their own ecological resources by opening up the entrance of consumer application scenarios in the living room, and find hardware products other than mobile phones as the traffic entrance to smart homes.
It is not difficult to see that no matter what is the starting point of hardware manufacturers or Internet manufacturers to launch smart speakers, in the future, smart speakers will eventually transform towards the entrance of living room traffic with a high probability. It is not difficult to see that this will be a huge and long process, and only step by step can we hope to truly occupy the market.
The premise to achieve these goals is to break through the development of smart speakers at the technical level, and constantly improve the voice technology and recognition capabilities in human-computer interaction. On this basis, we must return to the essence of sound. The sound quality and the source of the music are deeply laid out, and the sound quality is used to attract and impress the original needs of users on the speaker, and truly achieve the perfect integration of high-quality speakers and smart assistants.
In general, the potential demand in the smart speaker market has always existed, and allowing users to truly experience the joy of human-computer interaction and the joy of experience through voice is the core of development. With the continuous advancement of technology by major manufacturers, We are also willing to believe that there will be continuously improved products to bring us more surprises. Recently, Double 11, the time node of fierce competition for smart speakers, is coming, and the smoke of competition between major manufacturers may once again permeate.
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