(Original title: The final end of smart speakers may be similar to smart watches)
Wen/Wang Fei
Last year, my colleagues and I tried to test Bentham Street while experiencing HTC Vive. I was very excited.
At that time, we wanted to formulate a “slotslot index†for technology products. This meant that when trying out which technology products, the number of products with the highest number of streetside products was representative. At that time, the HTC Vive’s lying slot index was very high, and colleagues were not even When the young Demos were all at the end of the game, they were lying down.
This year, I watched some media evaluations of Nintendo's new handheld Swtich and "The Wildlife of Zelda's Wilderness," and also put forward a fresh vocabulary that can be understood as "time freshness", which means when you are experiencing a product The more experienced the more the discovery of the new continent has been opened up, and the deeper it is...then the freshness of its time will be higher, that is, the longer you use it, the more you will find it.
I think that as long as the "floating index" is high enough and "the freshness of time" is also high enough, a digital product may become more than half.
To be honest, today when I was writing all kinds of smart speaker technology, products, and experience, it was actually like last year when I wrote VR (virtual reality) - "horizontal groove, lying groove, lying groove", " Buy, buy, buy..."
To be sure, almost all Chinese Internet giants and artificial intelligence companies are trying to show their talents in this category of smart speakers, and this "visible", "touching" and "hearing" hardware products, It is also far more reliable than the "PPT artificial intelligence".
But smart speakers, is really artificial intelligence technology in place, you can fire up the product?
The speaker's intelligence and “time freshness†are limited by how many smart appliances can be bound...
The intrusion of giants quickly warmed the speaker market.
January 2017: Baidu United Fish released a video intercom robot equipped with DuerOS at home;
June 2017: Tencent unveiled a small-scale "pro-see H2" in conjunction with Digital Home;
July 2017: Ali launches "Tmall Elf X1" equipped with AliGenie human-computer interaction system.
Giant companies and speaker manufacturers have stuck to the speaker, more is the determination to compete for smart home entrance, and behind the big data.
But even in the two-year-old buzzbox, Rokid, who started the startup three years ago, it is not doing well enough on the C-end track of smart speakers. The reason is not that the speakers themselves.
On the one hand, Chinese consumers have left over the history of traditional speakers; on the other hand, the Chinese consumer's home environment and smart speakers have formed a strong contrast, the scene elements are not sufficient, and naturally cannot be just formed.
Unlike the speaker's sound quality, recognition accuracy, etc., the “time freshness†of a smart speaker depends on how many smart appliances can be connected in your home. Only when the family has more than enough smart devices, the core functionality of the “sound control†smart speaker can play a role.
The question of whether or not to buy a smart speaker has changed from "how well the speakers do" to "how many smart devices consumers have", "whether these smart devices can be connected," and the question of "can't complete a better experience"? .
This has nothing to do with the artificial intelligence technology that most smart speaker manufacturers show off and want to display. Instead, it is a purely commercial issue.
Most ordinary people do not have so many scalable marginal products at home. Even a "geek home" with enough smart hardware is faced with the problem of "stopping the team":
I bought the Tmall Genie and couldn't even connect to Jingdong's smart air conditioner; I bought the Xenon speaker and couldn't even connect to Ali's smart humidifier; I bought my own H2 and couldn't connect with Xiaomi's electric light.
In the past three years, the situation of warlords in the field of smart homes can still be solved by using "a bunch of control apps on a mobile phone." However, manufacturers cannot always allow users to buy a bunch of smart speakers at home.
Conversely, it is also very unrealistic to want to use a smart speaker with a unit price of around a thousand dollars to restrict users from “acquiring only a platform for cooperating home appliancesâ€.
Therefore, the "skills" of China's smart speakers can only stay in listening to songs, listening to comic dialogues, and listening to weather forecasts, which are superficial and have no interest in disputes.
The fire in the West is not necessarily the fire in the East
In November 2014, Echo, Amazon's Echo of Smart Speakers was officially released. You can see that today's so many smart speakers, BAT's killing, is basically derived from this product.
In 2014, Echo was more focused on speakers, making it difficult to find it as an entrance to a family scene, not to mention the number of “slotsâ€; in 2017 Echo turned to become a voice-based The platform, according to reports, has opened more than 10,000 kinds of skills.
Perhaps, after all, Jeff Bezos's trick was seen. Two years after Echo’s release, Google Home launched with Google Assistant was officially launched.
For less than three years now, the number of Echo is close to 10 million. According to a report released by eMarketer, a market consulting company, about 70.6% of smart speaker users in the United States are Amazon users, and Google only accounts for 23.8%. It is the surprise strike of this speaker performed by Amazon that has ignited the Chinese consumer electronics market that is seeking new growth points.
But in a big sense, the Chinese speaker market is not only hot because of Echo. In 2017 Apple WWDC, Apple officially launched the HomePod speaker product, this product's main sound quality, not too much emphasis on artificial intelligence and voice assistant.
"Apple's definition of the product is very smart because dialogue speakers do not have any feeling for the average consumer. But if it is an Apple speaker product, and the traditional 'voice quality' concept, it may lead to more consumption. The attention of the person." A speaker industry person said to PingWest (micro signal: wepingwest).
In fact, he described it as a matter of natural logic - from the habit of "buying a speaker" to "having a speaker", he finally used to talk with voice and speakers. This is the logic of speakers made by Amazon and overseas markets.
But this is not the same as the products currently emphasizing artificial intelligence in the Chinese market. In China, people rarely have the habit of buying a speaker every other year, and there is less time to focus on smart speakers; furthermore, artificial intelligence is an obscure one. The technology, the technology of Chinese speech itself still has some problems.
In other words, the Western world is astonished by the fact that speakers do not have a “slotâ€. It is a naturally occurring process – smart speakers are derived from the natural extension of the traditional speaker category.
In the Chinese market, using artificial intelligence to package a concept for a speaker, forcing users who do not need a speaker to plug a speaker, is totally not the case.
Overseas market research company Counterpoint Research has issued a report - 2 million smart speakers will enter the Chinese market this year, but it is still inferior to the US's 14 million. We also used Aurora Big Data to run a report on mainstream smart speaker data in the domestic market to reflect the current share of smart speaker users:
Since all smart speakers need to be connected to the mobile App during initialization, we can observe the smart speaker's shipment level through the side of the mobile app's installed capacity. As can be seen from the data in the above figure, the ranking of domestic smart speaker products has a direct relationship with the time of speaker release, and the product ranking has a lot to do with app release time. However, two years ago, new products were released and continued to be launched. The installed capacity of the "smart speaker" is only about 90,000.
Although this figure does not fully represent sales, it is ambiguous to judge from an order of magnitude that the overall popularity of smart speakers in the past two years is not even high for smart watches.
Smart speakers are not yet available in the consumer market.
However, how long does it take?
“The giants actually broke into the real good, letting more people know that there are such products,†“the functions that can be achieved are still limited, we will continue to polish the borders,†and “functions will improve with product upgrades.†"We must wait patiently for the outbreak of this market..."
This is almost an interview with each speaker company in response to "how to treat the Chinese speaker market tepid" issue.
Both the speaker business owners and market research organizations believe that the Chinese market will have to wait until the outbreak of the smart speaker market.
PingWest's product statistics also show that although the BAT platform is all deploying artificial intelligence and smart speakers, the number of products reaching the consumers so far is around 10.
You know, consumers never pay for technology. This year, the growth of AI technology is nothing but the ultimate goal is to fall into consumer hardware, there is more hardware to get more consumers, consumers pay for products, product companies pay for technology, and finally form a benign ring .
In the market has not risen, consumers have no special concept for smart speakers, giants involved in the market to educate consumers in the early period, "go down" may be every speaker companies, manufacturers can give the only answer.
Of course, "going down" is nothing more than a need to have money to continue - or continue to raise the valuation of financing, or open source and throttling, in order to continue to polish the product experience, continue to expand the application of speakers in the home scene, until the speaker market outbreak, Consumer recognition.
But high valuations, low sales, and the inability to realize whether these problems can carry the influx of capital, companies, products, and entrepreneurs in the speaker market that do not know when to fire? There are too many undecidable factors, and it is not clear what the final result will be.
In those years, the last bubble product...
Speaking of “going down†and connecting to smart homes often, it reminds me of products that have become technological bubbles.
Illustration from: kejilie
Two or three years ago, smart hardware fired, but it ebbed again. In essence, the traditional hardware + WiFi is filled with a Smart name. In fact, it is ultimately found to be a pseudo-requirement - people do not want to use a mobile phone to control the smart home, and for the public, intelligent hardware acceptance Not high, those companies become a big bubble.
Last year, VR became a bubble because it was technically inadequate. The scope of application of the product was too narrow and the experience was not good enough. Instead, the product price was high, the valuation of the company was too high, and the capital entered was too much. , also formed a huge bubble;
This year, AI talents have become a trend to become a bubble - talent is too expensive, the company's high valuation, but the specific needs can not be realized directly, can not reflect the civilian population, can not form a wide range of values, C-side companies may have to Form a bubble;
I want to focus on those elements that match the bubble:
In a short time, a lot of people came out - on the speaker issue, because of the opening up of the BAT technology platform, a number of technology startups have emerged, but the overall core technology is still subject to people; there are a large number of shell products. All the BATs compete, and there must be cannon fodder at the end. Those who fall are the entrepreneurs who cover the technology shell.
Inputs and outputs are not proportional to each other - making a good product is essentially a process of technological output; the company that makes loudspeakers is essentially an artificial intelligence company. Technology will fall on the product, so that more consumers feel the value. If there are only high-end technologies, there will be no more consumers in the end, and the technical energy invested will become a bubble.
In essence, dialogue speakers are actually hardware + voice (AI technology). From the current point of view, the improvement of AI for voice interaction itself is still limited, and C-end users have not adopted it in large numbers. At present, no extensive application of scenarios has been formed.
From the maturity of technology to the application of products, if products are not used by large-scale consumers and there is no continuous “time freshness,†they may have to be a short-lived outlet...
Actually, I have a smart speaker
As a practitioner in this industry, my family really has a smart speaker.
A few months ago, I found a founder of a smart speaker company and bought one within a few days before it was listed. On the issue of improving the efficiency of voice technology - now I basically develop the habit of listening to songs and broadcasting news with this product. Every morning I will say "xxx, play news!" and "xxx, play lyrical music".
So far, it's still a company that I think is the best product. No matter if the product's appearance or the overall voice technology experience can give a very high "slot" index, I did develop some voice wake-ups. The habit; but only here, the part of building a smart home is not so smooth, it requires me to replace all the traditional electrical appliances at home, or be directional. Over time, it stopped there, there was no longer "freshness," and it was more like a "traditional speaker."
This reminds me of the first Apple Watch I bought that year. I adjusted all the settings and pushed it, but in the end, it was still a "traditional watch" that I had to charge every day.
The smart speaker's end may be the same as lying on a gray smart watch, but it is a pity to use it.
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