After Facebook launched the smart voice control device Portal, the four kings of Silicon Valley officially arrived, and they all entered the smart voice control device market, including:
Amazon: Echo series
Google: Home series
Apple: HomePod
Facebook: Portal
In addition, Baidu, Xiaomi, South Korea's Samsung and Japan's LINE have also launched smart speakers. All of a sudden, a hundred schools of thought contended, and there was quite a feeling that smart phones came out in early 2007. Is the smart voice control device the next model after the smart phone? Below I analyze the competitive strategies of the four kings.
To the point.
background
It all started with Amazon's launch of the Echo device 3 years ago, equipped with the intelligent voice-activated assistant Alexa, and it became a dazzling style. So far, Amazon still has the most supported third-party features (Amazon calls it Skills).
The sudden emergence of Echo caught many companies by surprise. In the past, there were countless companies that wanted to "occupy" the living room. In the early days, it was mostly cut from the perspective of TV, such as Amazon's FireTV, Google's Chromecast, and Apple's AppleTV. Earlier, Xbox and PlayStation tried to log in from game consoles. However, the results are limited, and it is impossible to form an ecosystem or attract customers other than players. Why did Amazon open up the situation 3 years ago?
The biggest difference is that there are various online services today. Today, there are four things that were lacking in the past: popular wireless broadband, popular accounts, rich online content, and mature voice recognition capabilities. It can be said that the popularity of PCs laid the foundation of the network; the popularity of the network laid the foundation of the cloud; the popularity of the cloud laid the foundation of the mobile phone; and the popularity of the mobile phone laid the foundation of the voice control device.
For example, in the past, Xbox could only play games on DVD, and digital photo frames could only play photos downloaded from PC. Now Google Home can not only listen to music, listen to e-books, ask the weather, check Wikipedia, and remind the calendar. If there is a screen on the device, you can also watch YouTube, talk videos, and even shop. Even as a digital photo frame, artificial intelligence selects the most exciting photos from tens of thousands of photos in the cloud and continuously rotates them.
The mature voice control interface allows the whole family to use it, not just players or tech masters. Since my kids learned to speak Hey Siri, I can no longer listen to music peacefully; I only hear them constantly "blocking" HomePod and changing to "baby shark".
Amazon's vantage point
And Amazon is in an advantageous position. From an offensive perspective, smart speakers are home devices, and Amazon originally focused on serving families. Amazon has collected various family information, including name, address, credit card data, etc., and has also established a variety of services for the family, such as Amazon Prime. Americans do not necessarily use Apple or Google devices, but almost every family has an Amazon account.
From a defensive point of view, Amazon has no chance on mobile phones, so it must find another way. This allows Amazon to see the opportunity for smart voice control devices.
In contrast, Apple CEO TIm Cook once said: "We have the most powerful home device, that is the iPhone. Every user takes the iPhone into the living room, so the iPhone is the remote control for the smart home." This "mobile phone first" thinking Let Apple fail to notice the opportunity of independent voice control devices, and must rush to catch up. (I will discuss Apple’s views later)
But it is too early, and the market is changing rapidly. The advantages and disadvantages of the 4 companies are discussed below:
Amazon doesn't make money from hardware
Amazon's biggest advantage is that its business model is very different from the other three. Amazon is the platform for all transactions and draws "taxes" from all transactions. "Tax" includes not only the handling fees on Amazon.com, but also the costs of companies using AWS, logistics, and warehousing.
Therefore, Echo can be regarded as Amazon's Point-of-Sale (Point-of-Sale) in every household, while Alexa is the "counter sister" in every household. The more people ask Alexa questions and buy things through Echo, the more money Amazon can collect from businesses. So Amazon must sell it at a price close to cost and widely authorize Alexa to be adopted by third-party companies. Last month, Amazon launched more than a dozen Alexa-enabled devices, including microwave ovens, sockets, and video recorders. Amazon's pricing will be very competitive.
On the other hand, its disadvantage is that it cannot serve areas where Amazon Mall has not landed. For example, we have almost no reason to buy Echo because of the lack of related services.
Facebook's hardware is unclear
Last week I analyzed that Facebook’s investment in smart speakers is the most surprising and the strategy is the least clear. Its advantage is that it has 2 billion users and is a new generation of global address book and time-killing device. So at first glance, Portal has the opportunity to become a new generation of phones and TVs.
In addition, Facebook makes money from advertising, and it would logically depress prices, which is considered an advantage. Facebook's goal is to fully grasp the objects users follow and contact, and become the carrier of all social activities. With Portal, it is possible to expand the customer base to children and the elderly.
But a closer look is full of problems. Portal uses Alexa as its smart assistant, and Facebook itself only innovates on video calls, and does not add much value. There are no special features for other third-party services. This is because consuming attention and passing time is a unique and complete usage context, which lacks intersection with other services. So Facebook can’t support many hardware either — no one can use microwave ovens for video calls.
In addition, I also mentioned that the voice-activated interface is not suitable for advertising, so Portal cannot generate much revenue (it is slightly better with a screen). We can only hope to bring data, and the strategic goals are also very weak. It's more like Facebook's fear of being screened out of the market, so hurry up to make a product.
Finally, companies that rely on advertising have privacy concerns. In particular, Facebook has been doing bad things in the past year, and launching Portal at this time is almost daring and ignorant of current affairs.
In the final analysis, Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp are both visual and textual apps, so they have emerged with touch phones, but they seem out of place on voice-activated devices. Portal may just marry Alexa in the end.
Google’s business model alternation
Google is in an alternate period of business models, so analyzing hardware strategies is also slightly more complicated.
Google’s current business model is to charge advertising fees. Google ads are fundamentally different from Facebook ads: the former uses the attention of users actively searching, while the latter uses the attention of users passively passing time.
Standing on the advertising business model, Google will also encounter the difficulty that Facebook encounters: voice control does not match the advertising model.
However, in recent years, Google has turned to "smart assistant" as its main strategic direction, and independent of its hardware business. This helps to shift to a business model closer to Apple: selling hardware to make money. The difference is that the differentiation of Google's hardware is artificial intelligence.
This is an innovative model. For the new model to succeed, Google must prove to customers that artificial intelligence has unique and difficult to catch up value. At the same time, customers must be persuaded to forget the cost of artificial intelligence—loss of privacy. I have to observe the development of Google.
However, the biggest difficulty comes from within: reconciling the conflicts between the old and new business models in Google. To make money from hardware, a sense of value must be created; but advertising will destroy privacy and hurt sense of value. On the contrary, if Google wants to expand paying users, it may have to increase the content of YouTube paid subscriptions; however, it will reduce the advertising space. Whether the policy can be unified determines how fast Google hardware can go.
Apple's strategy is simple and effective
Contrary to Google, Apple’s business model is consistent and best understood: selling hardware. Its advantages and disadvantages are also very obvious.
The disadvantage is that the price is high and the customer base is inherently limited. In addition, Apple emphasizes the right to privacy (shaping a sense of value), and it does its best not to collect data, which is also detrimental to training artificial intelligence. This is why Siri came out earlier than other smart assistants, but it is always stupid than Alexa and Google Assistant. Apple's choice is the opposite of Google.
In addition, as mentioned earlier, Apple is good at designing personal computers and is not suitable for designing shared devices. For example, Siri has not been able to recognize the different voices of family members so far.
Of course, Apple has many advantages, including the dominant position of the iPhone, a high-growth customer base, the most developers, a global marketing channel, a well-trained supply chain management capability, a strong brand, and leading software and hardware integration design capabilities, etc. .
And Apple's biggest advantage is that it insists on a pure business model and intends to open another new path. Some people think that Apple has not catered to the trend of smart voice control devices at all, but has a different vision. Apple also agrees that computers will move from "personal computing" (personal compuTIng) to "ambient computing" (ambient compuTIng)-that is, the mobile phone disappears, and the surrounding computers can be controlled with voice.
But Apple believes that the core of "ubiquitous computing" is not smart speakers, but wearable devices, such as Apple Watch. In Apple’s imagination, when people want to play music at home, they should raise their wrists to speak, rather than shouting at the speakers at the other end of the living room.
In this vision, Apple Watch follows the user at any time, and the family is just one of the application scenarios. At home, HomePod is a peripheral product connected with Apple Watch / Siri, not the core. Now look at the shipments of Apple Watch. Who says that Apple is lagging behind in smart homes?
Is Amazon's "family first" strategy correct, or will Apple's "wearable device" strategy win out? It's hard to tell. I can only say that you should never underestimate Apple.
future development
Who will stand out? It depends on whether the smart home is the next model or just a small battlefield in a larger trend.
At present, it seems that Facebook's niche is weak, Amazon has geographic restrictions, and Apple's vision is a bit far away. Instead, Google has both technology and design capabilities, and can bet on both the "family first" and "wearable device first" strategies at the same time. The location is the most advantageous.
However, after analyzing the four kings, we can find that hardware and software are only basic skills, and content and services must be provided. For example, Alexa has Amazon Prime videos and music, Google has YouTube, Apple has Apple Music, and Facebook itself is the largest content aggregator. Manufacturers in other regions-it's already very hard to catch up.
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