Is the smart speaker worth buying? After reading this you understand!

[Wisdom.com] Voice interaction will be one of the development directions of smart home control systems in the future. Smart speakers will have great potential as interactive entry and control centers. However, with regard to the current development of smart speakers in China, due to the lack of voice recognition capabilities, the limited home appliances supported by various brands, and the relatively closed ecology of audio content, the potential and practicality of smart speakers have not been fully realized.

To say which products in the smart home industry are the hottest, smart speakers are definitely one of them. As an entrance for users to interact with smart homes, smart speakers can be used as a control center for various home appliances in addition to broadcasting weather-playing music to tell jokes. As a result, many technology giants have launched their own smart speaker products. Domestically, such as Ali's Tmall Elves, Xiaomi's little love classmates, Tencent listened, and so on, Amazon Echo abroad, and Apple's HomePod and so on.

It can be said that giants have entered smart speakers one after another, and the news on smart speakers is everywhere on the network, as if they did not buy one.

But before we buy it, we may need to rationally think about what kind of changes smart speakers can bring to our lives.

On the surface, a smart speaker is an ordinary speaker, but it actually carries many new technology applications such as voice interaction, artificial intelligence, cloud computing capabilities, rich audio resources and service content. It is also based on these technologies, smart speakers can be called "smart", otherwise it is no different from ordinary Bluetooth speakers.

For now, most smart speakers on the market mainly have the following functions:

Voice interaction

The main selling point of the smart speaker is voice interaction, which controls the smart speaker through voice, such as the most basic voice song, to control the home smart home appliances, and then to the relatively complicated online shopping, voice interaction is the core of the smart speaker. But in terms of effect, there is no essential difference between the voice control of smart speakers and the voice assistant of the mobile phone. Some people even think that the smart speakers are nothing more than a voice-assisted glove in the mobile phone. How much consumer interest in smart speakers remains to be seen confirm. Think about how long have you not played Siri on your phone?

Control smart home

The smart speaker is considered as the future home intelligent control terminal. It is like a universal voice remote control that can control basic smart home devices such as lighting, curtains, televisions, air conditioners, washing machines and other smart home devices. However, in order to realize these functions, it is necessary to purchase supporting home equipment. So in the case of smart home devices that are not yet universal, it takes a long time for smart speakers to become home control terminals.

Domestic services

Life service is also one of the selling points of smart speakers. Through smart speakers, you can check the weather and news, and also provide peripheral services such as food, hotel, entertainment, road conditions, train tickets and other information. Let you get a more convenient life service without opening your phone. The smart speaker also provides some useful gadgets such as calculator, unit conversion, check limit line, message and other gadgets. However, compared with mobile phones, it is difficult for users to control the smart speaker through voice to obtain the exact result that is desired, or it requires multiple queries.

Play multimedia resources

For smart speakers, playing music is just one of its basic functions. Smart speakers can also play a variety of audio resources, network resources and so on. For example, some brands of smart speakers can directly play various audio and video content in a smart way through cooperation with Baidu Music, Himalayan FM, Tencent, etc., to satisfy users' demands for content in all aspects. However, smart speakers lack a display interface and the convenience of operation is not as good as a mobile phone. On the other hand, under the current ecological environment, smart speakers of various brands can generally only use content within their own brand ecology. So compared to the combination of mobile phone and Bluetooth speaker, the advantages of smart speakers are not obvious.

In general, smart speakers provide a new way of human-computer interaction. The ability to control home appliances via voice is also a sci-fi feeling of Jarvis' artificial intelligence assistant, Jarvis. In fact, Facebook founders And CEO Zuckerberg's home has a set of his own developed voice control system, and its implementation is similar to the current smart speaker, but its higher degree of intelligence, the recognition of the language is more accurate, does not appear "Sorry I didn't understand this kind of chatter.

It is worth mentioning that there are two good news about smart speakers in the near future. First, Facebook, which is deeply infiltrated by users' privacy leaks, postponed plans to release their own smart speakers. Intelligent speaker as an entrance to control the smart home, its security is self-evident, smart home era, how to ensure that the user's privacy and security is also a mandatory course for manufacturers.

Another news is that Apple has drastically cut down on upstream purchasing and manufacturing orders for smart home speakers, HomePod, from the previous 500,000 units to 200,000 units. Analysts believe that the price of up to $349 and Siri's low IQ have delayed HomePod.

Therefore, whether it is at the technical level or the user level, smart speakers still have a lot of room for development.

However, smart speakers are not unusable, and the way of voice interaction is very suitable for scenes that are busy with other things and are not convenient to free up hands; in addition, if there are elderly people at home, they are less likely to use mobile phones to check information or a certain household appliance is not very useful, and voice control. It has unparalleled advantages. Another busy day home and lazily lying on the sofa to move the mouth to turn on the air conditioner, close the curtains, turn on the lights, cook, etc., is also a very pleasant thing; there are emergency situations such as call for help and so on. Therefore, for now, smart speakers need to work hard to solve the pain points and scenes of user needs, and truly bring practicality and convenience to users.

Wisdom.com believes that in the long run, voice interaction will be one of the development directions of smart home control systems in the future, and smart speakers will have great potential as interactive entry and control centers. However, with regard to the current development of smart speakers in China, due to the lack of voice recognition capabilities, limited home appliances supported by various brands, and relatively closed ecology of audio content, the potential and practicality of smart speakers have not been fully realized. Replace the status of smart phones. However, with the advancement of artificial intelligence technology and the formulation of smart home industry standards, smart speakers will surely develop faster.

——————————————————————

Reprint statement: This article is an original manuscript of Zhijia.com. If you need to reprint it, be sure to indicate the source (Chicai.com) and the author. Any offenders will be held accountable!