As smart home starts to enter thousands of households, the competition for smart home platform among the major giants is becoming increasingly fierce. In the smart home control center, whether Google is always at the forefront of science and technology, or Amazon is making a fortune, it is the same to choose smart speakers. Apple, as a catcher, hesitated for a long time about the control center, and finally joined the form of smart audio. The trend of three giants keeping abreast has gradually emerged.

Unlike other electronic products, the competition for smart speakers is no longer about speakers and sound quality. It is more about the competition for smart home platforms, or even the competition for the entire smart home ecosystem. Who can occupy the market first will get more support from manufacturers. For smart home, the platform is a natural barrier. Choosing a platform means choosing an ecosystem. Smart home is more dependent on the ecosystem than mobile phones.

international brand

Amazon Echo Series

Among the international brands, Google, Amazon and Apple, the three most influential giants, began to layout several years ago. Amazon, based on online shopping malls, was the first to make efforts, but the pace was very cautious. Perhaps because of the failure of Fire Phone, its Echo was even an "experimental" product when it was launched, and it was not very intelligent, only able to complete some "purchases" Class services and basic voice services, but it is also based on its best Internet retail business that has brought Echo a good reputation. With the continuous market praise, Amazon finally listed it as a strategic business. With the appearance of Alexa's voice assistant, Echo can be said to have added wings. Amazon later launched Echo Dot/Dot 2nd, Echo Tap, etc. with better cost performance. At present, Echo has quietly occupied about 70% of the market share of foreign smart speakers.

Google Home

Under the leadership of the "naughty boy" founder Sergey Brin, Google has made all-round development in the science and technology tree. Google glasses, robots, driverless cars, and life sciences are all the same. Google is unparalleled in single wheel technology and artificial intelligence algorithms. In terms of the layout of smart home, Google is also more aggressive and very generous. At first, it bought the popular Nest smart home with 3.2 billion dollars. With the birth of Google Assistant, Google has the ability to challenge all intelligent device manufacturers, and Google Home with Google Assistant came into being. Based on Google's powerful database, Google Assistant has a steady stream of statistical data from global Google search, Android and smart home users. It is incomparable in terms of resources, and its technology accumulation in voice recognition and AI has given it even more wings. If you ask which smart speaker is the most intelligent today, it is undoubtedly Google Home.

Apple HomePod

Although Apple has temporarily lagged behind in the AI and smart home wars, after all, it has a large number of user groups, its product lines cover smart phones, tablets, personal computers, and smart watches, and has a complete closed-loop ecological chain. Therefore, compared with other brands, Apple has higher brand loyalty and obviously has greater advantages in acquiring old users. Unlike Google and Amazon, which chose smart speakers at the early stage of smart home development, Apple has adopted a more flexible choice on the smart home "control center", rather than a single control center. Before the release of HomePod, this function was performed by Apple TV or iPad. Now, all three can be used as control centers, and HomeKit can be used remotely with any one of them. In terms of voice assistant, there is no doubt that we are very familiar with Siri, so it can be controlled through multiple platforms such as iPhone, Apple TV, and iPad. The advantage of HomePod is that it can use voice to control in a large range, and there is no need to carry devices such as iPhone/iPad at home all the time. Although Siri is less intelligent than Google Assistant at present, it has more advantages in Chinese speech recognition. In addition, Apple, which is familiar with the operation rules of the Chinese market, is obviously more experienced in marketing than Google and Amazon.

Domestic brands

Jingdong/Dingdong speaker/JBL

Among the domestic smart speakers, JD is the first giant to exert its power. From the perspective of the company's business and business model, JD is the closest to Amazon. Therefore, when providing logistics services for smart speakers, such as ordering household goods, the perfect supply chain system and its own distribution can be seamlessly connected to the service. In terms of smart speakers, JD is quite clever. It has combined the most powerful iFLYTEK voice in Chinese speech recognition, and cooperated with third-party speaker manufacturers to produce them. However, it may be that JD has encountered great pressure in terms of profitability in the past few years, so its scientific and technological reserves seem to be insufficient. Therefore, in terms of ecological construction of smart furniture, JD has not done well. Although it has opened the WeChat platform, there are only a few third-party products supporting the platform, which are not enough to form an ecosystem in terms of quantity or quality. To make matters worse, although Tencent has not released relevant intelligent hardware, it has announced that it will develop its own intelligent furniture platform, which makes JD, as a Tencent family, more embarrassed.

Tmall Genie X1

As a product of Alibaba, the Internet giant, Tmall Genie X1 has attracted much attention. Unlike JD, which is slightly short of technology reserves, Alibaba, which is rich and powerful, has made a lot of efforts in science and technology. Its smart home platform, Alibaba Xiaozhi, has been running for a long time. The big data provided by Alibaba's large user base, coupled with the strong support of Alibaba's enterprises, Alibaba Xiaozhi can be said to have a smooth flow in the construction of the ecological chain, and the third-party intelligent hardware is ahead of JD Microlink in terms of quantity and quality. The release of Tmall Genie X1 not only represents that Ali Xiaozhi has officially entered the era of intelligent scene, but also more importantly, it has joined the voice print recognition capability that other smart speakers do not have, and opened the channel of "voice payment". From then on, you can buy and pay through voice, which is also the most deadly "killer" of Tmall Genie X1. And with the improvement of Tmall Supermarket and Cainiao Logistics, JD's advantages on the Internet retail platform are gradually being weakened. In addition to Ali's consistent strong performance in the price war and subsidy war, Alibaba Xiaozhi has replaced JD Microlink as the most likely platform for Amazon Echo in China.

Xiaomi AI speaker

From the perspective of the construction of smart home ecology, Xiaomi is obviously the fastest and farthest among domestic manufacturers. The process of Xiaomi's transformation from a single mobile phone manufacturer to a "department store" is almost the history of its smart hardware development. Unconsciously, Xiaomi has covered TV YeeLigt smart light, door and window detection, temperature and humidity sensing, human body sensor, air purifier, air conditioner switch, smart switch, wall switch and other full set of smart home solutions, and the Xiaomi router can make these devices form an intelligent scene. The arrival of Xiaomi AI speakers completes the last piece of puzzle of Xiaomi smart home system - voice control.

In terms of control center, Xiaomi has a slightly different choice from other manufacturers. When you have only one or two smart devices, the mobile APP is the control center. When you build an intelligent scene, Xiaomi router is the real control center. Both Xiaomi TV and Xiaomi AI speakers are "microphones" to enhance the experience of smart home.

Go out and ask Tichome mini

It is slightly different from the above several manufacturers. Go Ask has implemented a dual product line scheme. It cooperates with Google to launch Tichome mini speakers with Google Assistant in foreign countries, while the domestic version uses the system developed by Go Ask itself. Just like its TicWatch, the foreign version uses Android Wear, while the domestic version uses a more localized self-developed system, which has proved to be effective. Its TicWatch is almost one of the best domestic smart watches. However, the major giants are different. Going out and asking questions do not have the ability to cover the complete ecological chain of smart home for the time being, which also makes them pay more attention to the production of special intelligent hardware, and their accumulated technical ability in Chinese speech recognition is enough to make them comparable to iFLYTEK. These companies, which are relatively small in size but focus on smart watches and smart speakers, may be able to open up a different sky through a two pronged approach.

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