[Global Network Science and Technology reporter Wang Nan] The Internet's enthusiasm, one does not pay attention to be "repertoire." “Big companies themselves have their own prior technical preparations and they can react immediately as soon as the outlets come in; we can only follow them and go step by step,†said the head of marketing at a speaker manufacturer in Shenzhen. With the release of the Amazon smart speaker Echo three years ago, the market for the integrated audio assistant Alexa's smart speaker was instantly "burned". In March 2015, only four months after the launch of Amazon Echo, Jingdong's first speaker was formally established. On April 25th, Tencent launched its “Intel Tencent Jingleâ€, an intelligent voice assistant (its project development team is affiliated with MIG, the mobile internet business group), and is sponsored by Amazon’s Alexa. On April 28th, Baidu and Xiaoyu jointly released the new artificial intelligence video calling robot “Split Fish†at home, carrying Baidu's conversational artificial intelligence system, DuerOS. July 5, Baidu AI developer conference, DuerOS open platform officially unveiled. On the same day, Ali artificial intelligence laboratory also released an AliGenie platform and a smart speaker "Tmall Genie X1" which is independently researched and developed by Chinese speech understanding engine. At this point, BATJ camps have gathered in the field of smart speakers. The official rise of the domestic smart speaker market began in the second half of 2016, and this is the ripple effect of the steep increase in Amazon Echo sales. According to the online statistics of Slice Intelligence, since October 2015, Echo's sales have ushered in a blowout and reached a climax in November of the same year. Of course, speaker form is not the key. Attracting many players, especially big players, is that Amazon has opened up the situation of intelligent voice systems. In the past half a year, 7,000 companies have access to the CES booth in the United States. Almost all Alexa's skills have exceeded 15,000. The emergence of successful precedents shows that the platform behind the smart speakers has a great imagination. Giants rushed into the market and small and medium-sized companies flocked to the market, once raising the possibility that the smart speaker market could become a popular outlet. Soon, it became the first key point of this battle. "There are 112 companies within one kilometer of Shenzhen Nanshan District to do voice intelligence." Li Haibo, general manager of the hardware division of the Himalayan FM hardware, has recently been widely circulated. "They don't know where the market is, where the users are, just know that the trend is coming, and I have to keep up." As soon as the tuyere arrives, orders are rushing to come. However, once the market cools down, a large number of overcapacity and pipeline resources invested in the early stage can only be digested by the supply chain. “Because there was no mature intelligent technology solution on the market at the time, voice interaction technology was not as popular as it was today. The creation of smart speakers at that time was 'You can respond to your dialogue, you can control it through Bluetooth, wifi, etc. The function is equipped with a smart speaker that is considered to be a better one.'' Xiao Zhang, a staff member of a smart speaker manufacturing company in Shenzhen, said that although the distance from Echo is a little bit far, but at the time, only in the fast and unbreakable environment, he took the initiative. Very important. Soon, the company organized and produced tens of thousands of such smart speakers, and quickly launched the market. At the beginning, it could also attract some purchases. However, the picture was not long and the sales volume fell sharply in the following months. In the first month, more than a thousand units could be sold, and then hundreds of units would be sold. Afterwards, the company would not be able to sell it slowly. “So far, the company has left thousands of products in warehouses and nobody cares. In Shenzhen, there are many companies that originally made tablets or mobile phones. They changed their brands to smart speakers. These companies sold Bailai units in a month, but they could not do it. They closed directly after a few months. At the end of the supply chain, the foundries are scrambling for a meager market share and even making a loss. So, what exactly can a smart speaker do? You can turn on the lights, adjust the air conditioner temperature, adjust the volume of the TV, adjust the curtains, play movies, etc. by using commands on the smart speakers. Even we can just provide the next command to the voice assistant and you can provide you with the best cinema nearby. The route, by the way, will help you set a good movie ticket and call a good car. If you want to get it, it can be done. During this whole process, you do not need to pick up your mobile phone. You just open your mouth and speak out what you want. The smart speaker can help you to complete it. However, the reporter found that after entering the "smart speaker" on Taobao, you can see a wide range of related products. These smart speaker products are mixed and mixed, with prices ranging from a few yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. Consumers without a certain amount of professional knowledge can hardly tell whether they are smart or not. Many of the speakers playing the "smart" banner only use cool lighting, exotic shapes, and so on, posing as so-called "frontier technology." However, in the use of experience, it does not take advantage of intelligence. The function is very simple, just playing music with a mobile phone, which is far from Echo. "The technology of understanding and responding to Chinese in conversational form is still immature," said Gartner analyst Tracy Tsai. She pointed out that the smart speaker devices in the Chinese market still have defects in speech recognition, which is the key reason why the Chinese market lacks acceptance of smart speakers. Bloomberg reported in its July 16 report that China’s market for artificial intelligence services in audio equipment is still in its infancy. Market research firm Counterpoint Research estimates that 2 million smart speakers will enter the Chinese market this year, which is still inferior to the US’s 14 million. The CEO of Horizon Robotics and the founder of Baidu Deep Learning Institute pointed out that there is another reason why smart speakers cannot occupy China's largest retail market in the world. Many people, especially young workers, rarely have time to listen to smart speakers at home. Echo in the United States, the most commonly used scene includes the source of information on the bedside and kitchen control, but in China, these two scenarios are not in line with national conditions, and the connected home smart devices are not rich enough to form just need. The unnaturalness of the scene and the unformed market of the central control market explain why the domestic smart speaker market was tepid. According to industry sources, the wave after Echo comes out, or after the emergence of HomePod, is not really a consumer boom, because the scene has not been polished; perhaps some people like technology products and will start with these smart speakers. However, there is still a big gap between this sales volume and overseas sales. Technology does not pass, consumers do not buy it, these factors together led to the current smart speaker products in the domestic market. Based on the monthly sales data of Taobao (including Tmall) e-commerce platform statistics, a total of 17,645 units were used to obtain the market share of each brand. Xiaomi’s Internet sales accounted for 26%, and the overall share of the top three was more than half. The remaining brands have low market participation. Overall, smart speaker online data based on the domestic market is not optimistic. At least, the stock market with monthly sales of less than 20,000 units and annual sales of no more than 1 million units is difficult to support the large-scale input mentioned in the previous article. And Liu De, the co-founder of Xiaomi, believes that smart speakers are only a supplement to the functions of mobile phones. "This is complementary, smart speakers can never be replaced in the center of the phone, so it is not a change (alternative). Smart speaker is a very interesting new thing, is to complement the function of the phone. In the United States, many families need music And the objective state of the room is not the same as in China. The demand for music from Chinese users is not as strong as that of the United States. I think there is a slight difference in market demand, so there is uncertainty here and we need to try.†"Winning and losing hands lie in resources." Liu De stressed that smart speakers and other hardware products are not the same, for example, the music library content is more demanding (copyright music library), so this is a test of the strength of each. "How do you integrate more genuine music? After all, there is a limited number of platforms that can obtain genuine music in China, so this is the ability to integrate resources." For the future of smart speakers, people in the industry stated that having voice interaction capability is the first step for speakers to become smart. The next step is to use voice interaction to complete the usage scenarios that may be encountered in various consumer lives. Smart speakers have more features. Although no one can determine how far a smart speaker can go in the future, smart speakers may be the best embodiment of speech interaction. In the development of voice interaction, smart speakers may not be the only terminal, but they must be indispensable. It can not replace the smart machine, but its development and voice interaction, artificial intelligence development should complement each other.