Last year, when my colleagues and I experienced HTC Vive (virtual reality), we were very excited when we tried and scolded.

At that time, we wanted to draw up a "recumbent slot index" for technology products, which means that when trying which technology product, the product with the most abusive times was representative. At that time, HTC Vive's recumbent slot index was very high, and colleagues even blamed the end of many small demos - "recumbent slot, and this kind of operation" recumbent slot.

This year, I watched some media review Nintendo's new handheld switch and The Legend of Zelda in the Wilderness, and also put forward a new word, which can be understood as "time freshness". It means that when you experience a product, the more you experience it, the more you discover it opens up a new continent, and get involved in it... Then the time freshness of it will be higher, that is, the more you find it is inseparable after using it for a long time.

I think as long as the "sleeper slot index" is high enough and the "time freshness" is high enough, a digital product may become more than half.

To tell the truth, when I was writing about various smart speaker technologies, products and experiences today, it was very similar to what I felt when I wrote VR (virtual reality) last year - "recumbent slot, recumbent slot, recumbent slot", "buy buy buy"

To be sure, almost all Chinese Internet giants and AI companies are trying to show their skills in the category of smart speakers, and this "visible", "touchable" and "audible" hardware product is indeed far more reliable than "PPT AI".

But is the smart speaker really a product that can become popular when the AI technology is in place?

The intelligence and "time freshness" of speakers are limited by how many smart appliances can be bound

The entry of giants quickly heated up the speaker market.

January 2017: Baidu United Xiaoyu released a video intercom robot with DuerOS at home;

In June 2017, Tencent and Digital Jiayuan released the "Meet H2" carried by microenterprises;

In July 2017, Alibaba launched "Tmall Genie X1" with AliGenie human-computer interaction system.

Giant companies and speaker manufacturers have jammed speakers, which more reflects their determination to compete for the smart home entrance and the big data behind it.

But even Dingdong speakers, which were laid out two years ago, and Rokid, which started its business three years ago, are not doing well on the C-end track of smart speakers. The reason is not the speakers themselves.

On the one hand, it is the historical legacy of Chinese consumers for traditional speakers; On the other hand, there is a strong contrast between the home environment of Chinese consumers and the smart speakers. The scene elements are not sufficient, which naturally cannot form a rigid demand.

It has nothing to do with the sound quality, recognition accuracy and other qualities of the speaker. The "time freshness" of the smart speaker depends on how many smart appliances you have at home. Only when there are enough intelligent devices in the home can the core function of "voice control" of intelligent speakers play a role.

The question of whether to buy smart speakers has changed from "how well the speakers are made" to "how many smart devices consumers have", "whether these smart devices can be connected", and "whether they can complete a better experience".

This has nothing to do with the AI technology that most smart speaker manufacturers try to show off and want to show off, but it is a simple business problem.

Most ordinary families do not have so many marginal products that can be expanded. Even the "Geek Home" with enough intelligent hardware is faced with the problem of "standing in line":

I bought Tmall Genie, which can't connect to JD Smart's air conditioner; I bought a Dingdong speaker, which can't connect to Ali's intelligent humidifier; I bought a personal H2, which can't connect Xiaomi's electric lamp.

In the past three years, warlords in the smart home field have been engaged in a melee, which can be solved by "installing a bunch of control apps on a mobile phone". However, it is impossible for manufacturers to let users buy a bunch of smart speakers at home.

On the other hand, it is also very unrealistic to use a smart speaker with a unit price of about 1000 yuan to constrain users to "only buy appliances for cooperation with a certain platform".

Therefore, the "skills" of China's smart speakers can only stay in the fields of listening to music, crosstalk and weather forecast, which are painless and have no interest disputes.

The fire in the west is not necessarily the fire in the east

In November 2014, Amazon Echo, the founder of smart speakers, was officially released. You can see that so many smart speakers and BAT are basically from this product.

In 2014, Echo focused more on speakers, making it difficult to find that it is the entrance to a family scene, let alone the number of "sleeper slot indexes"; Echo in 2017 has become a voice based platform. According to reports, it has opened up more than 10000 kinds of skills.

Perhaps, after all, we have seen through Jeff Bezos's trick. Two years after Echo was released, Google Home with Google Assistant was officially launched.

In less than three years, the number of Echos is close to 10 million. According to the report released by the market consulting company eMarketer, about 70.6% of smart speaker users in the United States are Amazon users, while Google only accounts for 23.8%. It was the surprise attack of the speakers staged by Amazon that ignited the Chinese consumer electronics market seeking new growth points.

However, to a large extent, the popularity of the Chinese speaker market is not only due to the emergence of Echo. In 2017, on Apple WWDC, Apple officially launched the speaker product HomePod, which focuses on sound quality without too much emphasis on AI and voice assistant.

"It is very smart for Apple to define products in this way, because dialogue speakers have no feeling for ordinary consumers. But if it is a speaker product of Apple and focuses on the traditional concept of 'sound quality', it may attract more consumers' attention." A person from the speaker industry said to PingWest.

In fact, he talked about a natural logic problem - from the original habit of "buying speakers" to "having a speaker", and finally used to talk with speakers with voice, which is the logic of making speakers in Amazon and overseas markets.

But this is different from the products that emphasize artificial intelligence in the Chinese market at present. In China, people seldom buy a speaker every few years, and they have little time to pay attention to intelligent speakers; Moreover, AI is an obscure technology, and there are still some problems in the Chinese voice technology itself.

In other words, the western world is not surprised by the sound box. It is a natural process - smart speakers are derived from the natural extension of traditional speakers.

In the Chinese market, it is totally different to use AI to pack a concept for speakers and force users who do not need speakers to fill a speaker.

Counterpoint Research, an overseas market research company, has issued a report that 2 million smart speakers will enter the Chinese market this year, but it is inferior to the 14 million in the United States. We also ran a data report on mainstream smart speakers in the domestic market with Evoque big data to reflect the current share of smart speakers:

It is mainly about the installed capacity of the app of the smart speakers sold at present. Of course, the product ranking has a lot to do with the release time of the app

Since all smart speakers need to be connected to mobile apps during initialization, we can observe the shipment level of smart speakers laterally through the installation amount of mobile apps. It can be seen from the data in the above figure that the ranking of domestic smart speakers has a direct relationship with the release time of speakers, and the ranking of products has a great relationship with the release time of apps. However, the installed capacity of Dingdong speakers (called "smart speakers" by apps), which were released two years ago and continue to launch new products, is only about 90000.

Although this figure does not fully represent the sales volume, the overall popularity of smart speakers in the past two years is not even as high as that of smart watches according to the fuzzy judgment of the order of magnitude.

Smart speakers are not available in the consumer market.

But how long will it take?

"It's actually a good thing for giants to break into the market and let more people know that there are still such products", "The functions that can be realized are still limited, and we will continue to polish the boundaries", "The functions will become more and more perfect with the product upgrade", "Be a little patient to wait for the explosion of this market..."

This is almost the answer to the question of "how to view the tepid Chinese speaker market" when interviewing every speaker company.

Speaker business owners and market research institutions both believe that the Chinese market will wait until the smart speaker market breaks out, perhaps until the year after tomorrow.

PingWest also shows that, although all BAT platforms are laying out AI and smart speakers, so far, there are about 10 products that can reach consumers.

You know, consumers never pay for technology. This year, the growth of AI technology is nothing more than to end up in consumer hardware. More hardware is used to obtain more consumers. Consumers pay for products, and product companies pay for technology, finally forming a virtuous circle.

In the early days when the market has not yet started to grow, consumers have no special concept of smart speakers, and giants are involved in the market to educate consumers, "endure" may be the only answer that every speaker enterprise and manufacturer can give.

Of course, "surviving" is nothing more than money to sustain - or continue to raise the valuation by financing, or increase revenue and reduce expenditure, to continue to polish the product experience, and continue to expand the application of speakers in family scenes, until the outbreak of the speaker market is recognized by consumers.

But can these problems, such as high valuation, low sales volume and inability to realize, bear the huge influx of capital, companies, products and entrepreneurs in the speaker market that do not know when it will become popular? There are so many uncertain factors that the final result is unknown.

In those years, the products finally boiled into foam

Speaking of "surviving", and every time I contact smart home, I think of those products that have become technology foam.

Two or three years ago, intelligent hardware became popular, but it was out of fashion again. In essence, traditional hardware+WiFi has been given the name of Smart. In fact, it was finally discovered that it is basically a pseudo demand - people are unwilling to use a mobile phone to control smart homes. Moreover, for the public, smart hardware is not well accepted, and those companies have become a big foam.

Last year, VR became a foam because of insufficient technology, narrow product application range and insufficient experience; However, the price of products is high, the valuation of enterprises is too high, and there is too much capital to enter. All of them enter the market, but there is no export, which also forms a huge foam;

This year, AI talent has a tendency to become a foam again - talent is too expensive and the enterprise overestimates, but the specific needs that can be achieved are not proportional, which can not reflect the popularity and cannot form a broad value. C end companies may also form a foam;

I want to focus on those elements that conform to foam:

A large number of start-ups emerged in a short period of time. With the opening of the BAT technology platform, a number of technology start-ups emerged, but the overall core technology was still under the control of others; A large number of jacketed products appear. All three BAT companies compete with each other. Finally, there must be cannon fodder. It is the entrepreneurs with technology shells who fall down.

Input and output are not in direct proportion - to make a good product is essentially a process of technology output; The company that makes speakers is essentially an AI company. The technology should fall on the products to make more consumers feel the value. If there is only high technology and no more consumers, the technical energy invested will become a foam.

In essence, dialogue speakers are actually hardware+voice (AI technology). From the current point of view, the improvement of AI on voice interaction itself is still limited, and C end users have not adopted it in a large number, and there is no extensive scenario application.

From technology maturity to product application, if the product is not used by large-scale consumers and has no continuous "time freshness", it may become a flash in the pan

Actually, I have a smart speaker

As a practitioner of this industry, my family really has a smart speaker.

A few months ago, I found the founder of a smart speaker company and bought one within a few days before listing. About improving efficiency with voice technology - I have basically formed the habit of listening to songs and broadcasting news with this product. Every morning I say "xxx, broadcast news!", "Xxx, play lyrical music".

So far, it is still the best company in my opinion - no matter the appearance of the product or the overall voice technology experience, it can give a very high "sleeper slot index". I really have developed some habits of voice wake-up; However, limited to this, the building of smart home is not so smooth. It requires me to replace all the traditional appliances at home, which should be targeted. Over time, it stopped here, no more "freshness", more like a "traditional speaker".

This reminds me of the first Apple Watch I bought back that year. I adjusted all the settings and pushed it, but in the end, it became a "traditional watch" that was recharged every day.

The end of the smart speaker may be the same as that of the smart watch lying on its back. It is a pity to discard it if it is useless.