Hundreds of boxes are released: Who will dominate the smart speakers in 2019? | mos777, yakin777

2018 can be said to be the first year of smart speakers in China.

The industry generally believes that smart speakers are an ideal entry point into smart home usage scenarios and are easily accepted by users. Once the smart home switch is turned on, more products and services will quickly enter consumers' daily lives, creating a more diverse business environment. Therefore, in the past two years, domestic and foreign technology giants and Internet giants have vigorously developed smart speakers, causing the field to grow by leaps and bounds and gradually moving from the niche to the masses.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to having a huge consumer market, smart speakers also serve as a "ticket" to the AI market for Internet giants. In this fast-paced era, competition among enterprises has become more intense. Being the first to own a ticket in a certain industry is equivalent to half the battle.

As a result, after foreign technology giants such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have laid out the smart speaker industry, domestic giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have also entered the industry. Products such as Xiaodu smart speakers, Dingdong, and Tmall Genie have skyrocketed in market activity. The domestic smart speaker market is booming, and then a "smart speaker price war" started last year.

Global Internet giants jointly set off a global wave of smart speakers

According to the "Global Smart Speaker Market Report for the Third Quarter of 2018" released by Strategy Analytics, global smart speaker shipments reached 22.7 million in the third quarter of 2018, a year-on-year increase of 197%, setting a record high. Among them, Amazon’s global share of smart speakers has dropped significantly compared with 2017, but shipments have been rising. In the third quarter, the market share was still the highest, reaching 32%, while Google followed closely with a market share of 23%.

It is worth mentioning that Alibaba, Baidu and Xiaomi smart speaker shipments from China rank third, fourth and fifth respectively in the world. Among them, Baidu performed the most brilliantly. Its market share increased from 1% in Q2 2018 to 8% in Q3 2018, surpassing Xiaomi and becoming a well-deserved dark horse.

According to eMarketer's "2019 Smart Speaker Market Trend Observation" forecast, China will have 85.5 million smart speaker users in 2019, surpassing the 74.2 million users in the United States. The penetration rate of smart speakers among American netizens is 26.0%, which is much higher than that in China, which is 10.0%. Therefore, there is still huge room for development in the field of smart speakers in China in the future. But even so, there are still huge challenges for domestic companies to further develop in the field of smart speakers.

First of all, there is the impact of more mature smart speaker products from overseas companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple. Amazon released the Echo speaker in November 2014, kicking off the smart speaker industry and catching Google, the “leader” in the field of artificial intelligence, and Apple, the “leader” in the device field, by surprise, becoming the No. 1 player in the field of smart speakers.One person, laying the foundation for his subsequent entry into the smart home field. Subsequently, technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple followed suit and launched Google Home, Portal, and HomePod.

Then, whether it is Amazon's acquisition of Internet router start-up Eero or Google's launch of Google Wifi, it shows that foreign countries are becoming more and more mature in the field of smart home, and the impact on the domestic market is huge.

Secondly, there is the native resistance caused by the complicated domestic smart speaker market. There are many manufacturers in the domestic smart speaker market, and there are mainly five categories: first, Internet companies such as BATJ, which hope to establish a smart ecosystem through voice and find new markets for existing content and services; second, technology manufacturers represented by iFlytek, which focus on the construction of technology open platforms; third, content manufacturers such as Himalaya; fourth, startups focusing on smart home; and fifth, traditional speaker manufacturers represented by Edifier.

Compared with foreign countries, in addition to more complex manufacturers and more intense competition in the domestic smart speaker field, there is also a certain lag in time. The first domestic smart speaker Ding Dong was born in 2015 and was jointly launched by JD.com and iFlytek. Since then, the domestic smart speaker market has been silent. It was not until Alibaba tentatively launched Tmall Genie in 2017 that Xiaomi, Baidu and other companies entered the market one after another, not to be outdone. Domestic smart speakers entered an intensive sales period. For a time, the smart speaker field was very lively, with "a hundred boxes competing".

When congenital deficiencies meet a harsh living environment

At present, we cannot deny that with the increasing number of Internet-connected devices in the home, smart speakers, which have a high probability of becoming the control center of smart homes in the future, are of extraordinary importance. But throughout the ages, as great as the benefits are, so are the risks. For the key-like smart speaker field, there are three questions that need to be answered before development.

First of all, how are smart speakers “intelligent”?

Whenever there is a new trend in the market, countless people will follow the trend, and smart speakers are no exception. In order to catch up with the trend of smart speakers, traditional speaker manufacturers have launched many products, but the selling points are all focused on sound quality, putting the cart before the horse. In addition, "speech recognition technology" is not yet perfect. People from different places have different accents in the same language, not to mention the natural language understanding problems involved in local dialects and contexts.

In addition, there are also common security risks in the fields of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, such as data storage, identity authentication, sensitive data protection, etc., which I will not go into details here.

Secondly, how can smart speakers increase their penetration and usage?

We know that the positioning of "the control core of future smart homes" in the Internet of Things era is one of the important reasons why smart speakers are so popular. The ideal smart home ecology is not about the intelligence of individual household products, but the interconnection with each other to achieve interconnection and mutual control. However, the current smart home systems are still in a state of independence from each other, making the usage rate of smart speakers low, and they are like "useless".

Compared with China, foreign countries are much more advanced in this regard. Take the United States as an example. The smart home industry in the United States has a unified standard protocol. Amazon’s Echo can directly connect to various smart home devices. This is why the popularity of smart speakers in the United States is much higher than in China.

Finally, how do domestic companies “go global”?

In terms of user habits, there are considerable differences between China and abroad. Taking the usage environment as an example, most foreign users’ home environments are open-plan, and American housewives like to listen to music while cooking. Therefore, the consumer demand for smart speakers abroad is also relatively high. In China, kitchens and living rooms are more closed and the living environment is relatively noisy. Accordingly, the market demand for smart speakers is low. This is one of the important reasons why it is difficult for foreign manufacturers to enter the Chinese market. Another limitation is the low degree of "localization" of human-computer interaction.

Take Apple HomePod as an example. Although its Siri voice assistant has achieved certain results in supporting Chinese, it still lags behind local players Alibaba and Baidu in terms of interaction and understanding capabilities. Moreover, domestic companies represented by BAT have more local resources, and it is difficult for overseas companies such as Apple to make breakthroughs in China. In the same way, domestic companies will encounter the same difficulties if they want to go global.

To sum up, smart speakers can be said to be "enemies from both sides". At this stage, the main purpose of the giants in developing smart speakers is not to make profits, but to seize more user households and pave the way for future AI ecological construction. So, how can SMEs survive this war?

Under the double storm, smart speakers can survive the winter with reliable content

As mentioned earlier, there is a category of smart speaker manufacturers in China that focus on content, represented by Himalaya. The author believes that such manufacturers may be better able to survive at this stage. Today's users' main demand for smart speakers is still in the context of "listening". Smart speakers are largely a battle for content ecology. On this basis, Ximalaya launched the smart speaker Xiaoya based on its own rich content, which will make it easier to break through in the home scene.

Although on the whole, Internet giants such as Ximalaya and BATJ have considerable weaknesses in technology and the overall layout of future AI, due to various reasons, domestic users' demand for smart speakers will be in the "listening" stage for a long time to come. Moreover, the core technology of smart speakers, "voice recognition", is essentially part of the content. From another perspective, Himalaya’s competitors are not Internet giants such as BATJ. Its development in the field of smart speakers is more to expand its own audio business and consolidate its position in the online audio market.

Similarly, Tencent also has a strong advantage in content resources. After all, the main purposes for consumers to buy smart speakers at this stage are content consumption and smart home. On this basis, Tencent can integrate its own music, reading and video to provide content support for smart speakers.

In addition to content consumption, the "smart speaker + education" model also has broad development space, especially in the field of early childhood education. Putting aside the much-talked-about online education, the importance Chinese people attach to their children’s education is enough for smart speakers to pay attention to the field of “early education.”

Judging from the current smart speaker market situation alone, the performance of the C-side consumer market in a short period of time will not be as good as that of the B-side. Therefore, how to establish a firm foothold on the B side and eventually feed back to the C side is a very important point in the development process of smart speakers. From this perspective, the future of “smart speakers + early childhood education” is very exciting.

After all, the qualifications of teachers in the domestic early childhood education industry are limited, and regional development is uneven. Most kindergarten teachers are employed after only short-term training, and the degree of professionalization is low. If smart speakers are combined with early childhood education, the large number of professional, systematic and scientific early childhood education courses it carries can perfectly make up for the shortcomings of traditional picture books, books, videos, etc., coupled with its advantages of simple operation, high safety, and no damage to eyesight, smart speakers can become an indispensable tool in the early childhood education process.

Of course, in addition to the above two directions, smart speakers, as the entrance to artificial intelligence audio terminals, can develop in a variety of B-side scenarios. In this regard, before the arrival of the C-end market, domestic non-giant companies have also made new breakthroughs in the field of smart speakers. Is that possible?