Artificial Intelligence in Life: Smart Speakers and Smart Homes

Name: Chen Xinyu? Student ID: 21009102266 College: Haitang No. 1 College

Reprinted from: Looking at the future of smart homes from the development of smart speakers (ofweek.com)

Smart speakers are electronic product applications and carriers of artificial intelligence technologies such as speech recognition and natural language processing. With the rapid development of smart speakers, they are also regarded as the future of smart homes. Entrance. In essence, a smart speaker is a machine with voice interaction capabilities that can complete a conversation. By communicating directly with it, home consumers can complete operations such as self-service song request, control of home devices, and evocation of life services.

The prerequisite foundation that supports the interactive functions of smart speakers mainly includes automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology that converts human voices into text, and natural language that analyzes parts of speech, syntax, and semantics of text. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, and speech synthesis technology (Text To Speech, TTS) technology that converts text into natural speech streams.

With the support of artificial intelligence technology, smart speakers are gradually creating more applications in home scenarios with more natural voice interaction methods.

Embedded Niubi artificial intelligence is used in smart speakers and smart homes.

Jianniu asked what applications artificial intelligence has in smart speakers and smart homes?

Embedded Cow Text

Today I would like to share with you an article about the development of smart homes.

The development of science and technology leads the progress of the times. Since the modern industrial revolution, people's living standards have improved with the development of science and technology. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, big data, 5G communications and other technologies, new lifestyles such as the Internet of Everything and smart homes have begun to enter the human world. ?

Smart devices resulting from the evolution of a combination of technologies have gradually made lifestyles such as the Internet of Everything and smart homes a reality. In today's hotly discussed fields of Internet of Everything and smart homes, smart speakers may be said to be one of the smart hardware with higher coverage. According to the latest report released by Strategy Analytics, global shipments of smart speakers and speakers with screens have reached 151 million units in 2020. From the development process of smart speaker products, we may be able to see the future of smart homes clearly.

Centralization: “Entry Theory” Hot Smart Speakers

Smart speakers first emerged in 2014. Amazon’s Echo speakers were the first to combine voice interaction with speakers, allowing speakers to realize Make phone calls, set alarm clocks, check the weather and other functions. Voice interaction brings new experiences to users, and Amazon has always occupied the largest market share in the smart speaker industry by virtue of its advantage of being the first to enter the game.

We can find that the original smart speakers were just innovative products of traditional speakers. Echo is also Amazon's first attempt to enter the hardware field based on the success of Kindle. After the Echo speaker became popular in 2014, the first domestic followers were e-commerce platforms like Amazon. In 2015, JD.com cooperated with iFlytek to launch the Dingdong smart speaker.

Due to its first-mover advantage, Dingdong smart speakers also occupied the first market position in the domestic smart speaker industry in the early days. According to public data, in 2016, Dingdong smart speaker sales accounted for 2/3 of domestic sales, but only 100,000 units. Later, with the emergence of competitors such as Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Baidu, Dingdong smart speakers completely disappeared in the long river of history.

At the same time, with the emergence of Xiaomi, Alibaba, Baidu and other companies in the smart speaker industry, the connection between the smart speaker industry and smart homes has become closer.

The emergence of the smart home concept can be traced back to the last century.

In 1984, the United States built the world's first smart building that connected computers with various subsystems such as air conditioning systems, elevators, and fire and disaster prevention; in 1994, Bill Gates integrated lighting, HVAC, home appliances, etc. into the computer system. Build a smart mansion. At this stage, smart homes are far away from ordinary people, existing in concepts and attracting people's yearning.

With the development of communication technology, automation control, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, people have discovered that smart homes can already be implemented on certain products, equipped with technologies such as Bluetooth, sensors, WiFi, and automatic control. Smart devices have begun to enter people's lives, and smart homes have entered the era of single-product smart devices.

Companies always like to bet on the future. Based on the development of technology, it can be judged that smart homes will definitely appear in the future, and they must contain huge commercial value. At this time, the competition for smart home data and traffic "entrances" has become the key for enterprises to bet on the future.

In people’s idea of ??the “entrance” to smart homes, smart door locks, smart TVs, routers, smart speakers and other products may become the entrance to smart homes. In this "battle for entrance", smart speakers have clearly gained the upper hand.

On the one hand, because in the United States, the penetration rate of smart speakers is extremely high, there are already precedents to prove the value of smart speakers; on the other hand, compared with smart door locks, smart TVs, routers, etc. In terms of products, high frequency of use and low threshold for use are more conducive to cultivating users' smart home usage habits.

In order to pave the way for the future smart home ecology, three companies headed by Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi have provided crazy subsidies in the field of smart speakers and attracted people to buy them through price discounts. Many products such as Xiaomi Xiaoai speakers, Xiaodu smart screens, and Tmall Genie are sold at a price that is not far from the cost price, or are sold below the cost price in order to exchange subsidies for traffic.

"You don't make money by making hardware" seems to have become corporate wisdom driven by "Internet thinking". This approach has also achieved good results. According to data released by IDC, since 2018, China’s smart speaker market competition has maintained a three-power struggle for hegemony. In 2020, Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi have the largest share of China’s smart speaker market. More than 95%. Dingdong speakers, which were unwilling to receive money for subsidies, completely disappeared from the smart speaker industry.

The popularity of smart speakers is inseparable from the competition among enterprises for smart home control entrances, traffic entrances, and data entrances. From the "entrance battle" of smart homes, we can also see that at that time Enterprises’ judgment on the centralization of smart home entrances in the future.

Decentralization: The scenario-based era of intelligent interconnection

In the battle for smart home entrances, smart speakers have gained users through subsidies, but making smart speakers is not make money. We can find that the top three companies in the domestic smart speaker market today all have Internet thinking. Exploring the profit methods of smart speakers from other angles is the "specialty" of these companies.

Just as the saying "scenarios are greater than traffic" is gaining traction, companies are building scenarios to increase the commercial value of certain products. Smart speaker companies have gradually begun to build scenarios and increase profit channels. Take the foreign Amazon Echo smart speaker as an example. Echo relies on Amazon's e-commerce business to launch voice shopping functions, which has become a powerful growth point for Amazon's e-commerce business.

Domestic companies are also showing their talents. Xiaomi smart speakers are supported by the Mijia ecological chain, Xiaodu smart screens are supported by Baidu’s search and information flow advantages, and Tmall Genie can rely on Alibaba’s ecosystem. Everyone is taking advantage of their advantages to find ways to make profits that suit them.

Each family’s smart speakers connect to their own or partner’s smart home appliances, allowing them to penetrate into living rooms, kitchens, caregiving, education and other scenarios, and explore ways to make money such as live broadcasting classes and selling smart home appliances. Smart speakers also cooperate with content-producing APPs, such as audio APPs such as Himalaya, music APPs such as QQ Music, education APPs such as 51talk, video APPs such as iQiyi, etc., to provide value-added services such as membership business.

In addition, Alibaba and Baidu smart speakers have also explored TO B business and cooperated with hotels to build smart hotels.

Recently, Xiaodu even launched a smart screen product with a rotatable screen, preparing to move scenes such as short videos, shopping, and karaoke that are frequently used on mobile phones to the smart screen.

While smart speaker products are building scenarios and looking for new profit channels, smart homes are also moving from the previous era of single-product smart devices to the era of scenario-based intelligent interconnection.

People’s lifestyles and home scenes are different, so the combination of smart devices is also different. Smart homes include living rooms, kitchens, balconies, bedrooms and other scenes. Users have various personalities such as loving sports and loving leisure. Smart home solutions that can accurately meet the needs of users' scenes are gradually becoming popular.

When smart home enters a scene-based era, traditional home appliance manufacturers begin to appear frequently in the field of smart home.

Smart home appliances are an indispensable part of the smart home scenario. No matter how smart the smart home scenario is, home appliances still have to complete their own functions. Therefore, traditional home appliance companies such as Haier, Midea, Hisense, and Gree are naturally unwilling to give up the opportunities brought by smart homes.

Many home appliance companies have begun to provide users with scenario-based solutions. Taking Haier Smart Home as an example, it even launched a scene brand called Triwing Bird, built a smart home experience cloud platform, and provided users with customized solutions in terms of food, clothing, housing and entertainment based on user portraits.

As the concept of scene-based technology becomes more and more popular, people find that the entry value of smart speakers is weakening. In the kitchen scene, a smart refrigerator with large screen + voice + WiFi and other functions can be used in most situations; in the living room scene, smart TV seems to have become the centerpiece.

Smart homes have entered the era of intelligent interconnection that focuses on scenarios. Through the collaboration between various scenarios, whole-house intelligence is built, downplaying the "center", or it can be said to form multiple " Center", the main feature of smart home in this era is decentralization.

The smart home of the future: centralization and decentralization coexist

Now we are actually in the era of smart interconnection that is mainly based on scenarios. The future of smart home will definitely depend on the combination of technologies. Arriving in evolution. Before analyzing the future of smart homes, it must first be clear that smart speakers are part of smart homes, and smart homes are part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

No matter what stage of development a smart speaker reaches, its components are hardware + software. Smart homes and the Internet of Things are also composed of hardware and software. The most important thing in hardware is the chip, and the most important thing in software is the operating system.

The operating system is a program that manages hardware and software resources. It needs to handle information interaction between things, control input devices and output devices, use artificial intelligence technology to analyze user needs, etc. The operating system can It is said to be the nerve center of the Internet of Things era.

The reason why smart speaker manufacturers are willing to sell smart speakers at a price lower than the hardware cost is not only to bet on the future and seize the entrance, but also to expand the audience of the Internet of Things system behind the smart speakers and collect data to make the system smarter. , is also one of the reasons.

Behind the three major smart speaker manufacturers are Alibaba’s Ali OS, Xiaomi’s Vela OS based on the Xiaoai open platform, and Baidu’s conversational AI operating system Duer OS. The data and usage in these operating systems The number of players is the key for companies to attract other smart device partners.

Companies that want to get a share of the smart home market want to build their own IoT systems and create their own set of standards. In addition to the above three companies, there are also IoT systems such as Apple's Siri OS, Huawei's Hongmeng OS, and Google's Fuchsia. Home appliance manufacturers such as Midea, Gree, and TCL have also been involved in IoT systems.

Due to different standards and different control methods, today's smart home industry is too fragmented, and the smart devices that people can control are limited. Just like Xiaodu smart screens cannot control Mijia home appliances. The fragmentation of the Internet of Things system has led to the fragmentation of people's current smart home scene experience, and smart homes have stagnated.

At present, various manufacturers have difficulty in developing smart homes due to commercial interests. So what will the smart homes of the future look like?

In the author’s opinion, the smart homes of the future will be smart homes. Devices can use technology to establish user portraits, provide personalized and intelligent services with the user as the center, and enter the active intelligence stage. Smart homes should treat user instructions like the human reflex arc (sensor - afferent nerve - nerve center - efferent nerve - effector).

Smart home devices receive signals through various inductive sensors and transmit signals through the network and sensors. The operating system with artificial intelligence technology processes the information in the chip, and then transmits it to each smart device through the network and sensors. signal to perform operations.

Based on this process, we can find that smart devices such as smart speakers are like human organs, taking on the work of sensors and effectors. There is no single entrance to smart homes. In terms of entry, smart homes are decentralized.

Liu Cixin's science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem" once depicted such a scene: the sword-wielder Luo Ji woke up in the Crisis Era after being frozen for 185 years. The basic physics of earth's science and technology has stagnated due to the blockade of sophons. , but applied physics is advancing by leaps and bounds. Inductive displays and inductive wearable devices are everywhere, and machine service networks are also everywhere.

Today’s smart speakers can receive people’s voice signals, and with the development of flexible screens, sensors and other technologies, inductive sensors may be ubiquitous in the home and can receive people’s voice, gesture signals, and even It can be brain waves.

The decentralization of smart home entrances ensures, to a certain extent, the decentralization of people’s experience in smart home scenes. People should be able to experience the convenience brought by smart homes no matter where they are in the home scene. Just like the scene in the American Marvel movie "Iron Man", Iron Man's artificial intelligence butler Jarvis can be awakened no matter where he is at home, and the information on the screens in the home can also be operated based on gestures.

However, a smart home control center is still needed to facilitate people to view and control each device. Functional control is centralized, but the distribution of control centers is decentralized. With the development of technologies such as flexible screens, people should be able to call up the control center anywhere in the home scene.

In the author’s opinion, the chip that carries the operating system should have both decentralized and centralized characteristics.

Because the Internet of Things is divided into multiple devices, and the chips in each device have certain information processing capabilities, they are inherently decentralized. The Hongmeng system recently released by Huawei is a distributed IoT operating system that can call the chips of each device to perform interconnection operations.

The current Internet of Things has low computing power requirements for chips. Last year, 50% of the 151 million smart speakers sold were chips produced by MediaTek; Samsung has also proposed using chips from old mobile phones and Sensors that turn old phones into IoT devices.

However, in the future, with the increase in sensors and smart devices, the data generated in smart home scenarios will also increase accordingly. It is more likely that smart homes will launch separate chips to process the data in smart homes.

The operating system in the chip must be decentralized. Taking the mobile phone system as an example, whether it is open Android or closed Apple, it is decentralized for developers. The smart home operating system is naturally decentralized for developers, partners, and smart devices.

In addition, in the context of the Internet of Things, current smartphones are the control entrance for information interaction between smart home scenes and other scenes. In the future, mobile devices that are more adaptable to people's usage habits may appear to replace smart phones. cell phone.

The smart home of the future will have both centralized and decentralized features. Decentralization of smart device distribution, decentralization of user scene experience, centralization of function control, decentralization of control entrance distribution, coexistence of decentralization and centralization of chip integration, decentralization of operating systems, smart home and the entire Internet of Things environment centralization of connections.

Conclusion:

Smart speakers are the "vanguard" of smart homes. From their development process, we can see the "centralization" and "decentralization" of smart homes in the development process. .

According to data from the Tianyancha APP, there are currently 133,000 companies in my country whose business scope includes "smart communications, smart home appliances, smart homes, and smart home decoration", and their statuses are active, continuing, and relocating. The proportion of enterprises and limited liability companies moving in or out is as high as 87.39%.

The commercial benefits contained in smart homes have attracted various companies. To a certain extent, this has resulted in the current situation of inconsistent standards and poor experience. However, it has also promoted the development of my country's smart home industry to a certain extent.

I hope real smart homes will come soon.