90% of smart speakers will die? Who will persist for longer?

After the release of Apple HomePod, the smart speaker market ushered in a new round of warming. Whether it is a technology giant or a startup company, whether it is a hardware vendor or a content service provider, whether it is a platform provider or a technology provider, it is building a complete ecosystem around smart speakers. Smart speakers have also been given more features, in addition to listening to music, encyclopedic knowledge, control of home appliances, but also access to more third-party services, such as shopping needs, LBS-based services: called express, called rental, called housekeeping and many more.

However, for the future development of smart speakers, smart speakers will become the control center of the smart home, smart speakers may increase the application scenarios, how the user's portrait will be, smart speaker is a giant market or the entrepreneur's world, if the smart speaker Who shuffles the cards first? ... For these issues, there seems to be more calm thinking in the industry.

Netease Science and Technology No. 49 Wudaokou Salon invited Vice President of Linglong Technology Fang Fang, Ji Jin FM Technology Director Jin Xin, Sibi Chi CMO Lung Meng Zhu, Xiaomi Intelligent Service Director Wang Gang, Shun Wei Capital Vice President Duan Yu, Zhi Zhi Founder CEO Xie Dianxia, ​​Lin Yili, Vice President of Product, and Song Shaopeng, Founder and CEO of Sugr Midtown Technologies, a professional from the platform, hardware vendors, content providers, technology service providers, and investors Explained.

Difference between Echo and Domestic Smart Speaker Users

Echo can be said to be a model for the success of smart speakers, as long as it mentions intelligent speakers will mention Echo, and domestic smart speaker evaluation will always compare Echo. However, for the difference between Echo and domestic smart speaker market, Long Mengzhu believes that foreign countries pay more attention to the basic innovation from 0 to 1, while China's advantage lies in the future application level innovation from 1 to N. She believes that China will definitely have more products than Echo, which is worth looking forward to.

Fang Li said that in fact, Echo users and domestic users are using more on-demand content. In addition, there are more and more O2O services in China, such as shopping services.

Song Shaopeng shared the three stages that Echo users experienced: In the first stage, the earliest batch of early adopters were geeks, mainly men, and the time was 2015, which was about 35 years old or more. The second stage was 2016. The year began to intervene in more general consumer groups. Female users began to increase from 35 to 50. In the third stage, consumers began to enter the broader market in 2017. The age of men and women in middle age started to descend into the 20s.

Going out to ask is to predict that there are probably several types of people who will buy their own speakers: the first category is a group of extremely high-tech customers; the second category is younger people; parents who have children may pay attention to some of them and buy it for them; The class is young students and white-collar workers.

3-5 years of interactive voice interactive form?

Long Mengzhu believes that Echo is a fortuitous product, and the whole inevitable development direction is behind Alexa. The future of Echo may not be just a smart speaker. It may be in the form of television, in the form of a refrigerator, or in the form of a router. The form appears even in the form of a pen.

In this regard, Wang Gang does not believe that smart speakers are the center of the family. Future voice interactions will surely transition to multiple centers. In the more distant future, they will become decentralized. This is not a device. All devices may have voice. Interaction ability.

Jin Xin believes that voice interaction is still a very important form of interaction, if it is better with graphics and images.蜻蜓FM hopes that users will have stronger demand for content, more control over smart devices, and higher demand for personal assistants.

Fang Li believes that in the short term, besides the speakers, the first product earphones suitable for voice interaction will have more attempts on headphones. Song Shaopeng said that everyone should not be limited by the word "speaker." Today's mobile phone is not a cell phone 15 years ago. To the next few years, the speaker is not the concept of this year's speaker. With this kind of vision, you will see many opportunities. , as well as many entry points to try.

The most common form of service in the future

With the user's portrait, what service will the user use?

Song Shaopeng said that at present, Echo is mainly used in three major categories: music, time, and information. Going out to ask questions predicts that common applications will be listening to songs and listening to content. Jin Xin believes that the content will be a very strong demand, and the other one is a take-out. Takeaway is a more targeted demand. The third place is the control of smart homes.

Long Mengzhu, the first product will be subdivided, resulting in a large number of content will be subdivided. One of the existing speaker products in China is Xiaomixiaoai’s control of smart homes and Xiaomi’s ecological chain; the second is that the entire payment and online experience households brought by Tmall’s elves have improved; the third is voice notes made by other industries. Class services will improve.

Fang Fang revealed that the speakers will provide shopping services, but the experience is not good enough. Next year, interactive products with screens will be introduced, so shopping will be a major direction; in addition, one is the direction of education, such as cooperation with New Oriental. Another is the control of smart devices.

Wang Gang said that the first thing he wanted to do was to communicate with WeChat; the other was to make an open platform that allows developers to integrate their applications and requirements on the Xiaomi platform.

The future of the giant is still the world of entrepreneurs?

Echo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have successively introduced smart speakers and gained more market share. Domestic and domestic Alibaba.com has released the Tmall Elves. Jingdong, Tencent, and Baidu are all in the layout. So, in the end the smart speaker is the giant's world or the entrepreneur's world?

Xie Dianxia believes that the domestic situation is more complicated, with more Chinese people and more diverse markets. Therefore, there may be one or two giants in China, plus some long tails in new areas. As for the giant, Xie Dianxia thinks that Xiaomi has advantages.

Song Shaopeng believes that smart speakers are only the first form of voice interaction and will iterate more. If you fall in the form of speakers, Tencent has a natural advantage. In other areas, Xiaomi also has advantages. "The competition between the giants will be separated by scenes, just like the mobile Internet BAT three different scenarios to solve the problem of the various scenarios, as we enter the voice interaction, we also hold the same view." Song Shaopeng said.

Lin Yili believes that in the future this era must be open, even if it is a giant, if things are closed, it may eventually be defeated by others. Therefore, he believes that the era of AI smart hardware is still very open.

90% will die? 燑font> Who will persist for longer

According to statistics, smart speaker players will die 90% next year. How can we persist for longer?

Lin Yili believes that companies that do not make money and have no money to burn will certainly die. "If a speaker company does not have an advantage in price, no advantage in experience, or no advantage in the channel, it may be really dangerous. In the end, it will really be one of the few good products and manufacturers left behind. Lin Yili said.

Song Shaopeng believes that smart speakers have just begun this year. There are already many companies that use smart speaker flags, but they will be eliminated by the market. If you want to have an advantage in a certain area, either channel, brand, user experience, or price, and want to survive, you must bring value to users.

Xie Dianxia also agreed with the above view, but he also said that whether the giant or the flourishing, it may continue for some time. Therefore, it is probable that next year will continue to prosper. Apart from a few big brands, intelligent speakers such as subdivisions, subdivisions, and market segments will still exist in large numbers. It may be a few years before the competition threshold is high, but it should be It will be longer than the cell phone cycle.

Breakthrough in smart speaker technology

From a technical point of view, smart speakers will involve an understanding of natural language. What will be the breakthrough in voice conversation technology in the near future?

Xie Dianxia thinks that if the existing technology defines the fields, defines the scenes, defines the objects to be used, has enough data, and builds a relatively mature map, the bottom line of the experience will make everyone feel better than mobile phones and better than any traditional experience. .

But the problem lies in the fact that the data is dirty and the data is dirty. For machines, the fault-tolerance rate of the machine is not so high. The final result is not what you want.

The other one is the algorithm itself. There is also a big breakthrough in language understanding, but it is only relatively large. When it comes to face recognition or speech recognition, it can be comparable or even exceed the human body. It also needs Several years to explore.

Song Shaopeng added that technical issues are divided into two layers. One is immediate and the other is future. Some actual technical problems in front of us, such as the large-scale application of voice, will still face regional problems. China is a big country, and the world is a larger area. The regional problems in this area are brought by it. The difference between the speech model and the semantic model requires time and engineering to solve.

Another challenge is that the humanities will play an increasingly crucial role in the future of the technology industry when it comes to building artificial intelligence products.

Whether it is the form of a smart speaker or not, the market for voice interaction is unstoppable in the future. The guests all believed that the breakthrough of 100 million units of voice interaction will be a matter of the past one or two years and the development will be very fast. Smart voice will be a blue ocean market. (quiet)