The three giants of Apple, Google, and Amazon are undoubtedly taking a fancy to the trillion-dollar smart home market in the future, but unlike Apple and Google’s clear smart home strategy from the beginning, Amazon did not have such huge ambitions in the early stage, nor did it With such a clear plan, the smart speaker Echo is more like a work by Amazon. Because of the success of the product, Alexa, the computing platform behind Echo, gradually revealed its weight. Many technologists commented that it might become the Android of the AI ​​era, which made Google very nervous.
Google spent US$3.2 billion to acquire Nest, a thermostat manufacturer, in 2014. It was a sensation when Google’s smart home strategy surfaced. Apple announced the smart home platform HomeKit in 2014. Echo was also born in 2014, but to this day, Amazon Echo has become the fulcrum of the global smart home market, which has led Google and Apple to rush into the smart speaker market. However, no matter how Google and Apple catch up, Amazon will be more well-known and more successful in this market.
The success of Amazon AlexaAn important reason for Alexa's success is that Amazon did not over-exaggerate the technology. Compared to Siri, which is more famous but often disappoints Apple users, Alexa and Echo are smarter.
Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, and Alexa is a smart voice assistant powered by Echo. Amazon's positioning of Echo is a product that integrates certain intelligent voice commands, not a chat tool. At the beginning, Echo only integrated a dozen commands and connected to a dozen applications. As users get used to talking with Alexa, Alexa has gained a positive word of mouth, and more and more applications are accessed.
Now, Alexa is more like a computing platform, by running each independent application Skills (commonly known as "skills") to achieve different functions. These Skills are similar to apps on mobile phones, and Alexa is similar to Android or iOS. For example, download and install a "skill" for "pizza takeaway" from Amazon.com. By waking up Echo, you can call for pizza takeaway; another example is to control the light switch and thermostat setting; for example, after setting a calendar, Echo will Be able to actively remind, go out to help call a car, listen to news and music, etc. As of the end of June 2017, the number of Alexa "skills" exceeded 15,000, while the number of voice applications based on Google's smart speaker Google Home was only a few hundred.
One reason for the rapid increase in the number of Alexa "skills" is that Amazon opened the Alexa platform very early to focus on improving voice technology. Amazon has released two toolkits, ASK and AVS. ASK is a software development kit that makes it easier for developers to develop "skills" for Alexa. AVS is a hardware toolkit that makes it easy for manufacturers to integrate Alexa into their hardware products. At present, there are many electronic products with built-in Alexa, such as LG refrigerators, GE lamps, Huawei Mate9 mobile phones, Lenovo smart speakers, and Ubisoft robots.
Another reason is that Echo's outstanding performance in intelligence has won word of mouth, and more third parties are willing to actively access Alexa. Amazon's requirements for Alexa's intelligent response are very strict. Toni Reid, the head of Alexa, said that when the user gives an instruction, Alexa has only one chance to deploy the corresponding action, so there can be no multiple rounds of dialogue, and the dialogue can be repeated twice at most, otherwise it will fail.
Looking at it now, Echo only uses voice interaction, abandoning gestures and screen interaction, and uses a new microphone array design to solve many voice recognition problems, allowing Echo to accurately recognize user utterances. This is actually Echo that stands out the most among many smart voice products. The key place. First of all, Echo only uses voice interaction. Compared with the diversified interaction methods of mobile phones and tablet computers with intelligent voice assistants, although there are fewer choices, it reduces a lot of unnecessary actions for users.
Secondly, Echo only uses voice interaction, which is equivalent to "forcing Liangshan", forcing Amazon to do a good job of voice recognition technology, so Echo has become the hardware product with the best voice recognition effect. Finally, Echo innovatively uses a microphone array to recognize voices to solve the problem of far-field voice recognition. Echo’s microphone array consists of six microphones. The microphone closest to the sound source can intelligently recognize commands, even if it is a sound from another room.
According to eMarketer's data, in the first quarter of 2017, Echo's market share reached 70.6% in the US voice assistant market, and Google Home accounted for 23.8%. Other vendors (including Apple, Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon and Mattel) share the remaining market share of 5.6%.
Google and Apple lagging behindUnlike Amazon, which only tried speaker products in smart homes, Google and Apple's routes have changed quite a bit.
As a software company, Google recognizes that the era of smart home requires hardware to conquer the world. So when it acquired Nest, Google had high hopes for Nest's thermostat products, which is the number one brand in the American thermostat market. Coupled with the smart function of the Nest thermostat, it can theoretically control the operation of various appliances in the home at any time, which lays the foundation for Google's vision of the future smart home blueprint.
When Nest was acquired, there were only two products: thermostat and smoke detector. After the acquisition, it did not launch new products in one or two years, because it is committed to making its products the central control center for all home appliances. Open API, attract more developers to join the R&D team of smart home, and create a smart home platform. At the time, the prevailing view in the smart home industry was that the platform was more important than the product.
However, today the Nest thermostat has not become an ideal smart home platform. After the acquisition by Google, it has not run well before the acquisition. There has been a large number of staff losses, management changes and operating losses.
Apple is also working on HomeKit, a smart home platform. Install the "Home" App on Apple mobile phones, tablets, and Apple TVs, and you can also call Siri voice operation to control door locks, various lights, sockets, home cameras, curtains, air quality detectors, etc. that support Homekit. Unlike Google, Apple has its own hardware family and a large number of Apple users as endorsements, and is more confident in the smart home market. Apple's official website shows that, as of now, more than 50 brands and hundreds of hardware products have been connected to HomeKit.
Apple's approach is to build a chip module in the products of various manufacturers to support HomeKit. Different from Amazon’s Echo’s affordable price route, Apple’s HomeKit maintains Apple’s customary closed route and supports HomeKit accessories. The price increases before and after support is large. Manufacturers need to develop a special version for installing HomeKit chips. There are many obstacles, the popularity of HomeKit is obviously not fast.
The success of Echo stimulated Google and inspired Apple. More and more users use Echo to manage home automation, and Amazon Alexa is showing great strength in the nascent smart home market.
As a result, after Nest has not achieved anything for a long time, Google is eager to build a hardware route for itself. In September, Google acquired the HTC mobile phone team, partly to strengthen its own hardware development capabilities. On October 4, Google released many hardware products such as mobile phones, earphones, notebooks, speakers, etc. at the autumn new product launch conference. Among them, the mini version of Google Home smart speakers was benchmarked against Echo Dot, which accounted for the total sales of Echo series smart speakers. More than half, and the price is less than $50.
Apple will release the first smart speaker HomePod at the end of this year. The HomePod will become the "hub" of the smart home by connecting the Siri voice system with HomeKit-compatible controls.
Google regards Google Home as the center of its smart home strategy. It is very similar to Echo in terms of price strategy, product type, and product matrix. It will also be open to third parties shortly after its launch in 2016, and it will compete with Amazon's Echo. Google Home is also integrated into Nest products, indicating that Google is slowly moving from a smart home platform strategy to a single product strategy. Apple HomePod is positioning high-end speaker products, not only smart, but also in pursuit of sound quality, and pursues Apple's consistent closed route. In terms of time, Google Home is two years behind Echo, and Apple HomePod is three years behind. Echo has established Amazon's dominant position in the smart speaker market. Although Google Google Home has made rapid progress, it is still far from Alexa in various smart applications.
Chinese companies should seize the opportunityThe success of Amazon Alexa is not accidental. Unlike Apple's Siri and HomeKit, Google's Nest, and the voice assistant Google Assistant, Alexa is set to run on a variety of different devices from the beginning of its design. Apple and Google’s voice assistants were originally installed on thin and small devices such as mobile phones or tablets, and only needed to improve near-field voice recognition technology. And Alexa's main focus is to adapt to the far-field voice recognition of various home appliances, to recognize real voice commands among multiple speakers, or to recognize voice commands from another room, etc., which are more in line with the actual application scenarios of smart homes.
Today, not only many foreign home appliance brands have access to Alexa, but also China’s Huawei Mate 10 mobile phones and Lenovo’s smart speakers also support Alexa. Lenovo speakers are products developed using the Alexa development kit. However, the development of Alexa in China is slow, and there are few overall solutions for Chinese intelligent voice interaction built around Alexa.
Domestic smart home products are mostly designed with the voice interaction solutions of iFlytek, Yunzhisheng, and Shengzhi Technology, but they are also quite fragmented. Whether it is professional voice technology companies such as iFLYTEK and Yunzhisheng, or Internet companies such as Baidu and Ali, they have not formed platform products like Alexa.
Judging from the fierce competition in smart speakers in the European and American markets, voice, as an ideal entry point for smart homes, is becoming an important fulcrum for the smart home market. For a time, domestic smart speaker products imitating Echo have emerged. Smart speakers are not a rigid demand for users, but the multiple competitions of Amazon, Google, and Apple on smart speakers have formed a herd effect on a global scale. Therefore, it is the best time to speed up the process of smart home.
Among the Big Three, except for the fact that Apple HomeKit has built a model room for smart homes in cooperation with Chinese real estate developers this year, and has made substantial progress in entering China, neither Amazon Alexa nor Google Assistant has entered the Chinese market on a large scale. This may have given Chinese companies a build. Time for the smart home platform. Xiaomi imitated Apple's thinking and built a smart home platform based on the hardware products of Xiaomi and Mijia, and it took shape, but this will not be able to achieve the goal in a short while. The important enlightenment of Amazon Alexa to Chinese companies is that creating a single product that truly adapts to the smart home scene and giving users a great smart experience on the product will be a viable solution to promote the smart home platform.
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