According to a report released on Thursday by the US technology website The Information, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is developing a Chinese smart speaker that will be released as early as next week.
When the growth of the smart phone market slowed down, many businesses started to tap smart device markets other than mobile phones. The most mentioned are wearable devices such as smart watches and smart wristbands. There are still some directions that aim at smart homes. Fields, such as smart refrigerators, smart TVs.
The audio sharing platform Himalayan FM launched the first full-content smart speaker "Xiaoya" on the 20th, and provided a set of voice interactive solutions based on this. Just before the Himalayan FM launched its own smart speakers, Cool Dog also released its new smart speaker "cool dog smart sound."
So what is the consideration of Alibaba, who is not very close to "music" and "audio"?
The Information said that the device will enable Chinese consumers to use voice-controlled virtual assistants to directly purchase products from Alibaba's shopping sites, just as consumers in the United States can use Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant on Echo to order goods directly on Amazon. .
Sources familiar with the incident revealed to The Information that Alibaba’s virtual assistants were developed by the company’s artificial intelligence team in China. Moreover, this product is mainly in Chinese, and its target users are domestic consumers who are familiar with Alibaba's online services. This also means that the product will not be released in the United States.
According to The Information, the new device is the latest attempt by Alibaba to understand the behavior of hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers who have used its online services. The author of the article, Juro Osawa, believes that Alibaba’s competitiveness comes from the large amount of consumer and business transaction data it has.
This month Jessie Guo, an analyst at Jefferies, described Alibaba as a "big data group."
All giants have entered the smart home market, perhaps because of their large scale. The consulting company, Strategy Analytics, predicts that the market for smart home-related hardware and services in 2022 will reach US$155 billion, which is higher than the approximately US$90 billion this year. According to statistics, smart speaker shipments have soared nearly 600% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of last year to 4.2 million units.
In June of this year, Apple introduced SmartPod HomePod to enter the field of smart homes.
HomePod continues Apple's usual "high price strategy" and sells for $349, which is significantly higher than Amazon Echo's $180 and Google Home's $129.
At the same time, in order to compete with Google and Amazon in the speaker field, Apple hopes to "fix" users through a combination of hardware and software. Apple said that for devices that do not support Apple Music apps (such as Apple Music), users need to pay $10 a month.
At present, from the perspective of market share, Amazon Echo accounted for 88% of the market in the fourth quarter of last year. Google Home's market share is 10%.
Comcn Electronics Limited , https://www.comencnspeaker.com