When asked what can a smart stereo do? The answer is definitely to listen to music! However, with the deepening of the understanding of the industry, when we talk about intelligent sound from a comprehensive and in-depth perspective, in addition to the sound quality and design of the sound itself, under the inspiration of “mass entrepreneurship, innovationâ€, we How to treat intelligent audio from the perspective of industrial ecological layout?
There is a survey from the credit bureau Experian and market research firm CreaTIve Strategies for the use of smart audio Echo. Of the 1,300 objects surveyed by the two companies, 180 have Amazon's smart stereo. According to the report, among the users, the top three features used by Echo are music playback, smart light bulb control, and timers; the top three features that users have tried at least once are timers, music playback, and newscasts.
This shows that smart audio is not just for listening to music. Otherwise, it will not attract the attention of many technology giants.
Because of the Internet of Things era, speech recognition is regarded as the entrance of human-computer interaction. Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, voice control has become more practical. In the "Internet Trends" report, the Internet Queen also said that voice will be a new paradigm for human-computer interaction. Voice technology will liberate human hands and eyes. In the future, interactive modes with smart homes, wearable devices, robots, etc., voice will be the best. Human-computer interaction mode.
Internet Queen Mary Mickel praised the Amazon Echo product in the 2016 Internet Trends report. This voice-based intelligent audio has once again caught the attention of the industry, and even regarded as a smart home entrance, I have to say Amazon Echo Has successfully opened the smart home entrance battle for the prelude.
The love of the giants for the intelligent sound, the love is deep and warm. For example, Amazon, Google, Apple...
Amazon released an Echo smart audio product with speech recognition as early as 2014. It is a combination of intelligent manual assistant Alexa's audio, with efficient radio engineering, allowing users to easily operate with natural voice and connect to Amazon's major platforms and partners.
In the same year, the Echo industry did not look at this product. Since many mobile devices have similar voice assistants, at the beginning of the release, the market thought that the functional side of this product was a bit sloppy. Including Amazon's own expectations for the future of the product, Amazon's original intention is very simple, that is, users want to use Echo to shop faster and more conveniently on the Amazon platform.
However, relying on the complete Amazon ecosystem and good voice engineering, the subsequent detonation of buying and high satisfaction also made Apple intend to follow up. Google has even launched a similar product, Google Home.
In order to express this love, Google's new product launch conference in San Francisco officially launched Google Home , a smart voice assistant product , which is priced at $129, in hopes of becoming the core of smart home. On the road of exploring the Internet of Things and smart home, Google has never wavered. Google Home combines machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform into a smart home control center that can be implemented with home devices such as TV, stereo, socket, lighting, and air conditioning. Connected to control the entire home environment. Google Home Voice is very powerful and can directly talk to it in two-way, and can't help but take on Google's strategy in the Internet of Things.
The advent of Google Home means that device control in the home has taken a big step toward personalization and intelligence. Since this is a new market that has just started, IHS Markit believes that the smart speaker market in 2016 is conservatively estimated to have shipped 1.3 million units and is expected to grow to 9.7 million units by 2020.
"Like Amazon Echo, Google Home doesn't look like a pure wireless speaker, it's more like an endpoint device for accessing virtual assistants," said Paul Erickson, senior analyst at IHS Markit. At the same time, the price of far-field speakers in 2017 is expected to drop to $99 due to the accelerated adoption of Google Assistant by third-party hardware partners. Once the retail price declines, the market growth of smart homes will also be expected to accelerate.
In order to do smart audio, Apple is not idle. In the past few months, Apple has made a lot of news about smart audio, and it is said that Siri voice assistant will be used. Now, "Apple broke the king" Mark Gurman got a new news, it is said that the development of this smart sound into the test phase, but do not know the release date.
Source News said that as an effort to enter the smart home, this smart sound equipped with Siri voice assistant is being tested by several engineers at home, and may be released after the product is ready.
In order to do a good job in Siri's voice search, the Siri team also made internal adjustments last year. Bill Stasior, vice president of the Siri division, has placed Apple's related search teams under the Siri department, which currently includes four teams, web search, proactive support (proacTIve assistance added to iOS 9, voice recognition, and Siri applications). .
Speech recognition and Siri application development are relatively well understood. Web search is mainly trying to use Apple's own services, not Google search results, which is part of Apple's Googleization; active support is a new feature in iOS 9, mainly to improve Siri local search performance, such as "Siri on iPhone" It is recommended to retrieve applications and contacts that are commonly used by users.
In 2014, Apple abandoned the idea of ​​transforming the TV box Apple TV and decided to make a Siri-driven smart sound. The test products are one big and one small. They even made a small home theater to test the sound effects.
Launched the "Family" app in iOS 10, and also opened some Siri features, the slow-moving Apple does not seem to give up on smart home. But in terms of the cooperation and search capabilities of smart hardware companies, Apple is not currently prepared.
With the Alexa fund, Alexa voice technology behind the open source Echo audio, Amazon has a large number of smart hardware companies, and recently expanded the Echo product line. Doing smart audio has become the most important way for technology companies to enter the smart home field, Amazon's Echo audio, Google's upcoming Google Home. If Apple's product is launched, it is the slowest one.
Generally speaking, foreign successful models or products, up to a year or so, will be successfully replicated in the country or even catch up quickly. But Amazon Echo is an exception. Since its release in 2014, only Google has spent nearly two years abroad to launch competing products like Home. But what about the domestic situation? In China, Jingdong and Keda Xunfei have cooperated to create smart speakers. The domestic technology giant Baidu also said that it will launch smart speakers to build smart homes around it.
However, it took more than two years for the country to imitate several products, but none of them copied Amazon Echo, which is widely accepted by the public. This in the end is why?
1. Smart speakers need ecological chain polishing, kung fu determines the experience, can not ignore any details
The smart speaker, as the home entrance of the voice intelligent assistant, goes far beyond the definition of the speaker. Is this hardware? software? Or platform? Hard to define, smart speakers involve a complete ecological chain of voice interaction.
If you don't invest in this product as a strategic product, it is estimated that the product you make is inevitably unsatisfactory. Although many domestic manufacturers believe that they are investing heavily, compared to Amazon Echo, this is a bit of a shame.
Amazon not only invests in thousands of people, but also puts Echo ads into the Super Bowl. This is very similar to the competition between mobile phones. Some domestic brands of mobile phones also think they are good, but when users get them, there will naturally be a measure of difference.
2. The sense of presence and immediacy of voice interaction is a key factor, but it is still under-ignited.
Voice interaction is undoubtedly the mainstream interaction after keyboard, mouse and touch screen, but it is always a little worse than the real distance to thousands of households. For example, vendors always feel that voice interaction is not intelligent at all, and it is true. There is no company in the world that can make voice interactions not stupid. The level of speech intelligence still stays in the content recognition and context analysis of keywords. There is no clear idea in the so-called grammar and language sense academia.
This requires a long-term research breakthrough, not only limited to the current hot machine learning and big data, but also needs to consider the concepts and models of the physical world.
Amazon Echo is actually facing the same dilemma. There are even many people who criticize Echo's speech synthesis is not good enough, because humans always want their words to get a similar response. Speech synthesis is really difficult to be as natural as humans, but it is not too far away from this goal. Google’s release of WaveNet last month caused a shock in the field of speech synthesis, which is a new idea.
3. Cultural differences between East and West also constrain the development of domestic voice intelligent interactive technology
There may be more differences in the understanding of smart speakers at home and abroad, but when the Orientals try to use the core of the smart speaker - the voice intelligent assistant, there is also a cultural obstacle, which may be the result of cultural differences between the East and the West. .
Human-computer voice interaction is actually the interaction of language. Even if speech recognition is 100%, there is no specific meaning for understanding language. Besides, language is always individual, scene and emotion.
to sum up
In 2016, the competition among smart audio manufacturers has intensified, not only in the content resources, copyrights, etc., but more importantly, how to further deploy the smart home field.
In fact, there are many smart audio products in China, but the domestic intelligent voice audio market is still a wild land. The domestic intelligent audio or voice intelligent assistant is still in the early stage of market education. There is still a small road full of thorns in front. Even if you know that there is a pit, you may drop a lot of pioneers, but the footsteps must go out, the prospect is inevitable. It is wonderful. Only by stepping on the pioneers will continue to grow and develop. It is not good to predict how long this roadway process will last, but it is worth looking forward to.
First of all, GoogleHome and Echo do not support Chinese, even if they do not enter the Chinese market. Secondly, the local local intelligent voice speaker has a universal voice experience. However, from the development of these years, the domestic intelligent voice speaker market should not be out of the market for more than five years, which will have a profound impact on the domestic smart home market. (Comprehensive finishing)
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