preface:

As early as 2004, the concept of smart home has been widely used in high-end properties. However, the high price of home servers and the high cost of renovation have always been calm. In 2014, as traditional home furnishing enterprises and Internet giants scrambled to layout smart home, smart home became more popular and no longer the patent of local tyrants, which triggered a wave of popularity, Smart home pioneers include professional players such as RICI, traditional home giants such as Haier, Gree, Midea, Internet giants such as Google, Baidu, Tencent, Ali, JD and Xiaomi, and various newly created small and medium-sized enterprises are accelerating the layout of smart home. In today's complex smart home landscape, due to the lack of unified industry norms and technical agreements, Each major tycoon has its own magic power. You have your own pattern, and I have my own rules. The competition for entrance is even more important. From the beginning of the route as the entrance, to the TV as the entrance, until JD and iFLYTEK jointly launched the dingdong blockbuster, people found that the original speaker can also be an important entrance. Due to the low threshold of smart speakers, which are more familiar with traditional products and easy to be intelligentized, various speakers have sprung up in the name of intelligence to shoulder the responsibility of smart home entrance. However, the author's consistent view is that at least you must be an excellent speaker, whether smart or entrance. With this attitude, let's have a look at today's product - Philips Xiaofei speakers. Thanks for the products provided by Lei Feng.com.

Unpacking:

Now I received two packages full of happiness. The main body of the speaker and the bracket were packed separately. The package appearance followed Philips' traditional style. The top was Philips blue, and the front printed main body rendering, product features and Philips' logo We can know the beauty and function selling points of the product only from the packaging.

Xiaofei's accessories are also rich in speaker body * 1, bracket * 1, power adapter * 1, instructions and San Bao certificate. Xiaofei's sweater is not random. Seeing such a cute Xiaofei, he quickly put on the Xiaofei's sweater and then couldn't take it off.

Details:

The main body is designed as a rounded cube, with a three-stage structure. The upper and lower parts are made of white skin friendly materials, which are delicate and elegant. The middle part is covered by a circular metal mesh cover, which effectively protects the speaker, has good dust-proof effect, and takes into account the needs of appearance. The design of the main body's minimalist style does not seem to have many highlights, Because of this, it can match with different home styles without being abrupt. 165x121x165mm is not a pocket size. If you put this product into the kitchen with a handle, you will definitely think it is a miniature rice cooker.

In order to protect the screen and the slightly concave top of the keys, the white husband material panel is simple and bright without any decoration. The eight control keys are arranged at the bottom of the screen in two lines. The key range is appropriate and good feedback. Because the speaker does not have the portable function, it does not worry about accidental touch. The author always thinks that the speaker needs a screen to tell the user the playing status, This is also the third speaker with a screen (the first two are Xiaojia and O2) that the author started this year. Although the Xiaofei dot matrix display screen is small and the display quality is not high, it also breaks away from the single control of the app and brings a richer interaction mode.

The functions of various buttons will not be introduced one by one, especially the magic A+key and the Bluetooth key. Xiaofei supports Bluetooth connection, but needs to switch to the Bluetooth connection mode on the host first. In fact, the existing Bluetooth supporting multiple audio speakers use the default open mode to automatically switch to the Bluetooth mode as long as Bluetooth has data input after pairing. In this way, the keys can be simpler and the user experience is better. The magic A+key can switch between music radio, music collection, my radio, casual listening, column subscription and other columns with one key. With such comprehensive keys and the screen's prompt for status and voice interaction, Xiaofei can move from APP to intelligence.

The inverted hole design behind the super large box not only extends the low-frequency diving depth of the speaker, but also reduces the nonlinear distortion of the sound wave and strengthens the performance of the low-frequency part. The Setup key, reset hole, AUX interface and power interface are set below the inverted hole. The mainstream AUX interface and Bluetooth connection can almost cover the connection problems of most devices.    

The four rose shaped silicone floor mat at the bottom is surrounded by the information such as the QR code and product serial number of the app installation. The soft material can effectively eliminate the resonance caused by audio playback.

If there are not many highlights in the design of the main body, now the highlights are coming. Put the main body of the speaker on the stand and immediately turn into a cute little flying man. The stand is made of ABS material, and the head and hands can be rotated at will, which can make him take different positions. The whole stand is left blank and comes with several sets of decorative stickers, so you can change your little flying man with DIY.

The support on the top is not fixed for easy disassembly, so it is not so convenient to move. I really like the design of the small flying ear part, which is just like the helmet of the space suit with headphones, and it is recommended that the top support add snap type fixation to the top support inside the ear bag to facilitate movement. The support tray has a very large area and is equipped with a flexible bottom cushion to effectively reduce resonance.

Application:

Xiaofei, which was jointly developed by Philips and Alibaba, certainly inherited the Internet gene. It scanned the QR code at the bottom of Xiaofei and downloaded the Alibaba smart client. After the installation, it needs to log in to the Taobao account. At this time, the author thought: little guy, if the Taobao account is given to you, don't wait for me to buy things at home. This is not cute, I think most users have the same security concerns as the author. In fact, filtering this is just Ali's entrance strategy. Your Taobao is safe.

Of course, Alibaba Smart's ambition is not a speaker, but the rules of smart home interconnection. Xiaofei is just an entrance to the control end. When many enterprises are still making single products and series, giants have been making platforms and rules to integrate traditional manufacturers to compete for home entrance. Alibaba Intelligence is like this, so is QQ Internet of Things, and so is JD WeChat. Alibaba Intelligent has integrated dozens of categories and more than 1000 single products, and new manufacturers are constantly joining. With the continuous improvement of the platform, Xiaofei will be able to control more than 1000 household products under the same platform in the future.

  The massive music library of Ali Ecological Platform contains 12000000 songs, 2000 radio stations, 1500000 hours of audio columns, and integrates audio resources such as Xiami Music, Douban FM, Himalayan FM, Dragonfly FM, etc. The content is relatively rich. Xiaofei can also promote your favorite content through big data analysis according to your listening preference, which has a little intelligence meaning.

With the growing maturity of voice interaction, many products have added voice interaction modules, which bring users a full sense of technology, but if the recognition ability is not high, it will bring users a very bad experience. Xiaofei also uses voice interaction, which is a speaker that can understand what you are saying. After the successful configuration of WIFI, Xiaofei uses this function to separate from the mobile phone APP. Xiaofei has excellent recognition ability, As long as you can basically recognize Mandarin, you can do nothing about dialects. The author tested Xiaofei with Mandarin and local dialects respectively, and the recognition accuracy of Mandarin is about 90%, while the accuracy of dialects is less than 50%. Although inferior to iFLYTEK, it is far superior to O2. As far as the speakers I have experienced, Xunfei x1 and dingdong are both from IFLYTEK's speech recognition technology, which has strong recognition ability and can recognize local dialects. Although it can't achieve 100% recognition, it won't bring too bad interaction experience. Xiaofei has to strengthen the enrichment of the dialect language library. After all, China has a vast territory. What's more regrettable is that it is inconvenient to input only by pressing the voice input button on the top every time. Compared with O2 voice wake-up and dingdong array microphone noise reduction, it is simply too low to support long-distance voice interaction. I hope the R&D team can further improve.

Xiaofei can not only connect to WIFI and support Bluetooth, but also is equipped with a NUX interface, which supports the intervention of most audio sources. Unfortunately, Xiaofei is not equipped with a battery and can only be connected to the power supply for use, which cannot meet the portable needs and outdoor scenes.

Sound quality experience:

As a speaker that focuses on smart home entrance, the author has no expectations for Xiaofei's sound quality in view of the poor sound quality performance of dingdong, a similar product, last year. How about Xiaofei's actual performance?

Two full frequency units can be vaguely seen from the metal mesh cover. In addition, the design of the inverted image tube can enable the speaker to dive in low frequency and broaden the low-frequency frequency response range. Xiaofei is relatively good in low frequency. Although it can not give you a shocking feeling, the 20-20000HZ frequency response range can bring you more imagination. The diving depth also benefits from the inverted image design. Since the author uses iFLYTEK x1 as a reference in all audio comparisons, today is no exception. Compared with iFLYTEK, Xiaofei's low-frequency part is thinner and less layered, but its transient response is obviously stronger than iFLYTEK's, and the bottom sound is very clean.

For most audio systems, it is difficult to distinguish the sound quality of the IF part. The main function of Xiaofei is to restore the sense of reality. Xiaofei has clear voice analysis, accurate restoration and strong control. Compared with the drag feeling of iFLYTEK under the same sound source conditions, Xiaofei can give you more details, stronger transient response and more transparency. The image is clear and tight, and the sound field is excellent, which is beyond my expectation.

The performance of the high frequency part is mediocre, and there is not much excellence. Xiaofei has a good performance in the interpretation of musical instruments. Most speakers are good at percussion and Xuanyue. The performance of wind instruments is relatively dry. Xiaofei really controls perfectly, which should be due to a lot of effort in tuning.

Product summary:

In terms of design, the author suggests that Xiaofei can build a music library, place batteries in the robot bracket to provide power for the speaker, and change the top bracket to a concealed handle and reinforce it, so that Xiaofei can be suitable for any scene. In terms of experience, Xiaofei has the ability to break away from the APP, but the interaction is still rather dull. The recognition ability of voice interaction needs to be strengthened. At the same time, if you have a lot of keys, you can press and hold the key before voice input, which has greater room for improvement. At the same time, it is hoped that Xiaofei can realize multi speaker linkage in the future. In terms of content, although it can meet the general listening needs, it still needs to strengthen the content upgrade. In terms of sound quality, Xiaofei's performance in each frequency band is generally satisfactory, and its strong points are sound field sense, instrument performance and transient response.

It can be seen that Xiaofei is not so perfect, the revolution has not yet been successful, and Xiaofei still needs to work hard. Fortunately, Xiaofei can learn to evolve and provide firmware updates regularly. Let's hope Xiaofei can make rapid progress to bring more and better intelligent experience.