(Original title: Apples involved in smart speaker battles)
Qian Tongxin
[According to the data released by Apple last week, Apple's developers have accumulated 70 billion U.S. dollars in revenue from the Apple Store since 2008. In the past year, Apple developers have generated a U.S. revenue of 20 billion U.S. dollars.]
Apple's ecosystem has new members.
Following Amazon and Google, Apple also announced the launch of smart speakers at its developer conference. The three major US technology giants gathered in this field.
Smart speaker battle
At the WWDC conference on Monday, Apple released HomePod, a smart speaker. Just as Alexa lived in Amazon’s Echo, there was a Siri in HomePod. Artificial intelligence assistant is the core of the smart home. It can let people control all the equipments in the home, such as turn on the lights and lock the door.
Apple's smart speaker is nearly twice as expensive as Amazon Echo, which was released earlier. HomePod's official price is 349 US dollars, Echo's price is 179 US dollars. HomePod will be listed in December this year.
At this year's CES show, smart products that support voice interaction have come into the limelight. General Electric has introduced a lamp compatible with Amazon Alexa. LG has introduced a smart refrigerator that can be controlled by voice. Even Samsung's vacuum cleaners can understand “peopleâ€. . The “science fiction era†of issuing instructions to machines by voice seems to have come to us.
Over the two years since Amazon Echo was released, sales have exceeded $1 billion. The logic of Apple's entry into this area is also very clear, as the iPhone's global sales are slowing, sales of new hardware will bring more revenue for the company.
According to research data from research firm eMarketer, in the United States, about 36 million users use voice-operated speakers every month. This figure has doubled from the same period last year. Looking at the smart speaker market prospects, the world's largest technology giants have integrated their latest artificial intelligence research results into this hardware and used them to control various household appliances ranging from refrigerators to air conditioners. The research institution IHS data predicts that by the end of this year, there will be more than 4 billion consumer electronics appliances using digital assistants of varying degrees.
However, Apple, which eventually entered the smart speaker field, adopted a different strategy from its competitors. It first emphasized that HomePod is a speaker device, followed by an assistant, which is different from Google and Amazon. Part of the reason is that Apple's smart assistant Siri did not have an outstanding performance in the competition, but music is Apple's main game. Apple hopes to make people accept that smart speakers can not only help people perform tasks.
Gartner analyst Lu Junkuan told the First Financial Reporter: "As an aftermath, Apple must use a differentiated competitive strategy. In terms of artificial intelligence, it is difficult to compete with the already existing Google artificial intelligence assistant or Amazon Echo. Let it show obvious deficiencies."
The practicality of Apple's speakers gives it a unique market position, which is why HomePod's price can reach twice that of Echo. As Forrester Research Institute believes, Apple's industrial design will make the brand produce a luxury effect comparable to Hermes, which is Apple's greatest advantage in distinguishing itself from competing products.
Now that Siri has been able to speak 21 languages ​​in 36 countries, it also means that Siri can not only be sold in English-speaking countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia, but also can be sold to countries like South Korea, the Netherlands, and Russia. In contrast, Google Assistant only speaks 7 languages, and Amazon's Alexa only speaks English and German.
At the same time, Apple executives including Cooke continue to emphasize to developers that the deep learning ability of Apple's smart assistant, Siri, has been greatly improved. Siri is now able to understand multilingual dialects including Shanghainese and can also translate.
China is the main battlefield for voice interaction
Although HomePod is late, Apple, which brings Siri to join the smart home entrance competition, will undoubtedly inspire people to maintain a higher expectation for the future world under the support of intelligent voice technology, and China will become the main battlefield of intelligent voice.
According to Tencent’s information provided to the First Financial Reporter, Chinese manufacturing companies are just around the corner when international giants have deployed smart voice markets. Chinese companies have a sound hardware industry chain, and the demands for intelligent upgrades in these industries have become stronger.
Statistics from Tencent show that in 2017 China's voice industry will exceed 10 billion in scale. In 2018, China's smart home market will reach 168 billion yuan. The domestic smart voice market is still in the start-up phase. Intelligent vehicles, smart homes, smart wearables and other vertical fields are on the eve of the eruption.
According to Tencent, Tencent's intelligent service open platform Tencent Cloud Micro will have a big move, allowing hardware to have voice and visual perception capabilities quickly, and giving the hardware more capabilities to build a cloud-to-end "smart cloud ecosystem." ". According to reports, Tencent Cloud Micro introduces the voice interaction into the cloud architecture and uses its huge computing resources and advanced artificial intelligence technology to realize a very high-level dialogue system. In addition to the ability to identify the engine, you can also connect to a wide range of service applications, such as weather forecasting, traffic inquiries, news and information, and online shopping.
It is understood that since the opening of the NPI in May, a number of manufacturing companies at home and abroad have access to Tencent Cloud's micro-micro capabilities, and some products are already in the manufacturing stage and will soon appear in the terminal market. Product categories include smart speakers, smart robots, car voice systems, and more.
System opening is a trend
For a long time in the past, Apple was not willing to open Siri to developers without reservation. Last year, there were less than 10 Apple apps that could use Siri, including taxi software and payment services. In contrast, Amazon has opened the voice assistant platform to more than 12,000 applications, including game applications and Amazon’s partner merchants, such as restaurants or pizzerias.
Gary Morgenthaler, Siri's early investor, said: "If you do not value the value of third-party applications, Apple is very likely to lose its leading position." He believes that Apple, which invented the Apple Store, does not attach importance to the application of the Apple Store. No solution.
In response, Lu Junkuan told the First Financial reporter: "Apple's HomePod may consider opening an interface to a platform such as WeChat, Baidu, or Taobao, allowing people to directly conduct WeChat voice conversations through HomePod. Because users are paying more attention to the hardware. The function is not the hardware itself. Of course, it should also be taken into account that Apple itself is not a very open system."
Amazon has used Echo as a user portal to bring more people into Prime's ecosystem. For example, people can buy via voice instantly when there is not enough food in the refrigerator. However, Apple HomePod will increase the stickiness of users through Apple's announcement of further applications, such as whether it can be used with Apple TV, and whether it can identify the different voices of family members and recommend different schedules for them. .
Lu Junkuan believes that Apple's hardware is mainly based on high-end users, which is the brand's consistent strategy. The functions announced at the WWDC Developer Conference are mainly defensive, allowing users to stay in Apple's ecosystem as much as possible, instead of turning to Android.
"HomePod will have a lot of room in China. Because Apple has a large number of mobile phone users in China, Apple itself is more familiar with the Chinese market than its competitor's understanding of Asia." Lu Junkuan told a reporter of the First Financial Bureau, "The speaker is now There is no competitor that can enter the Chinese market, and China's own participants do not make products that dominate the market. This is an opportunity for Apple.â€
Apple's loyalty may also be a plus for HomePod. Gartner analyst Brian Blau told the First Financial reporter: “Apple users are the most loyal, so each new hardware release will attract a large number of people's attention.†However, the current problem is that the high price of $349 may be A large part of the population is rejected.
Lu Junkuan said that although HomePod has high prices, it has obvious advantages and it is likely to become a leader in China. China's mobile phone manufacturers, including OPPO and vivo, are still focusing on the mobile phone itself, while the BAT giant focuses on services. Huawei is most likely to be a smart speaker, but Huawei does not have a similar product release, so Apple has filled a gap in the market.
On the other hand, Apple's entry may lead a trend and play an educational market role. China's domestic artificial intelligence start-up company will also release a smart speaker at the CES Asia show today, priced at $100. Going out to ask the founder and CEO Li Zhifei told the First Financial reporter: “This is absolutely positive! Apple’s release of HomePod is undoubtedly a good thing for us. Apple is going to educate users. We have companies like this.â€
Li Zhifei also told the First Financial reporter that he is also worried that companies like Xiaomi may break the market's innovation once they release similar competing products. "Millet emphasizes that design and quality are right, but if it makes the price very low, it leaves the company without profits, so there is not enough resources to do innovation and research and development."
HomePod is another major hardware product released by Cook since he was CEO of Apple in 2011. Two pieces of hardware released in the past include the Apple Watch that was launched in 2015 and the AirPod Apple headset that was launched last year. However, both products faced their own problems and did not produce any special sensation.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president, said HomePod will change the way people listen to music at home. HomePod's positioning is very close to the current Sonos stereo in the US market, but the Sonos basic Play1 audio is priced at only 199 US dollars; enhanced Play3 is priced at 299 US dollars.
Sonos is Apple's long-term partner, but the two are closer and closer to the competition. When technology giants began fighting for the music market, Sonos was moving closer to high-tech products. SonosCEOPatrickSpence said: "The company is very advanced in streaming music, but in terms of voice control, we must catch up."
In any case, Apple uses HomePod to show the world the results of its research in artificial intelligence over the past few years. However, many people overlooked another major feature of this release of Apple, which is augmented reality AR. Apple's newly released ARkit will be able to be used in billions of Apple devices. This feature is called "revolutionary." Earlier, Google and Facebook also released similar AR platforms, but none of them have triggered the market in practical applications.
The founder of LoopVentures and former Apple analyst Gene Munster predicts that Apple iPhone will become an AR product in the next five years and will eventually become a wearable product. ARKit will provide developers with unlimited imagination and develop a brand-new experience that is far beyond the current AR technology for users.
The release of AR for WWDC is likely to be a hint for the upcoming new iPhone features. Analysts predict that the iPhone 8 will usher in a "super sales cycle." If Apple can better combine the camera function and hardware, it can lead people to use AR trend to a great extent.
Pulling Chinese consumers
In order to win over consumers in the Chinese market, iOS11 will also integrate more features into WeChat. In addition, applications including photos, maps, etc. will undergo substantial changes. The new map feature will add information on the mall, landmarks, etc., and prompt the driver to speed limit.
According to Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, the iPhone's shooting function will optimize the storage space. At the same time, the new software will be able to better recognize images on the machine, enhance the depth of field effect, and continue to improve the iPhone's shooting quality. This move is seen as a competition with Chinese local mobile phone manufacturers that mainly use camera functions.
In March of this year, Apple released ClipsApp, which allows users to stitch videos, pictures, and music, create micro-movies, and upload them to social media. This function is similar to Snapchat or Facebook. According to Apple, games, photos, videos, and health apps are the fastest growing and fastest-realizing app categories.
The iOS11 system will also support peer-to-peer payments through a new feature called PayCash, which will share the market with SquareCash, PayPal and Venmo and even Facebook in the payment sector.
Through PayCash, iPhone users can transfer money to friends on the mobile phone, for example, they can use the AA system to pay for meals in the restaurant; at the same time, they can transfer funds directly to the bank and account. The mobile payment function is an important area for increasing the stickiness of users, and Apple has long been interested in this function.
From photo optimization to payment, Apple is targeting the market with the greatest potential - China. As of the latest quarter, iPhone China's sales have fallen for the fifth consecutive quarter. WarrenCapital (WarrenCapital) predicts that in April this year, Apple's sales in China fell by 14% year-on-year.
At this year's unprecedented WWDC, Apple's other important message to the outside world is that services are the fastest growing area. The scale of service revenue, including Apple Music, Apple Pay, cloud storage, and other App applications, will soon surpass the size of Fortune 100 companies.
According to data released by Apple last week, since 2008, Apple's developers have accumulated 70 billion U.S. dollars in revenues from the Apple store. Over the past year, Apple developers have set a record revenue of 20 billion U.S. dollars.
The Apple Store's interface may also be updated, small developers will have more choices to help promote their applications. In the past, some of Apple’s small developers accused Apple of abusing its dominant market position and taking away a large number of applications from China.
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