On November 27, I went out to ask and released the BOC version of Tichome Mini in Beijing, whose Chinese name is Xiaowen Speaker. Tichome Mini is the world's first portable waterproof wireless smart speaker, which was first released abroad in September. Unlike the international version with Google Assistant, the voice assistant in the national version is the VPA intelligent personal assistant who goes out to ask himself.

Going out to ask is a company exploring the next generation of human-computer interaction. It has gone through six rounds of financing with a total of 255 million investors, including Google and Volkswagen. Its earliest product is the voice assistant app. Around the voice entrance, the product line already includes Ticwatch smart watch, Ticmirror smart car rearview mirror, Tichome smart speaker, Ticpods smart headset, AI development platform, etc.

Tichome Mini mini speaker is a branch of the tichome product line. For the mobile needs of users, the main selling points are summarized as portable, waterproof and out of the door voice technology. The performance of the mini speaker is basically the same as that of the Ticwatch 2 series. MediaTek MT2601 (dual core [email protected] ）+512M memory+4G storage, supporting Bluetooth 4.1 and 2.4G wifi. On smart speakers, there is no need to drive the screen and a lot of system interfaces, so the performance margin is much larger.

In addition to the audio part, compared with Tichome, Tichome Mini is mainly lack of a DSP, and the noise reduction of dual microphones related to remote wake-up is carried out through a pure software algorithm. So in the official voice interaction comprehensive test, Tichome Mini is 3.3% lower than Tichome, but still 22.6% better than its peers (official test, the results are for reference only).

The rest of the hardware, including the appearance that won the 2017 Japanese Excellent Design Award, is available in white, pink, blue and black. The whole weight is 280g, the diameter is 110mm, and the thickness is 44mm. The audio part is composed of a 3W horn and a bottom reflection cone with 360 degree sound generation. Built in 2500mAh battery, it is officially announced that it can play for 6 hours continuously at the maximum volume and provide 17 hours of standby.  

The official announced that the original design was due to the habit of many foreign users to bring smart speakers into kitchens, bathrooms, swimming pools, beaches and other scenes. Through the design of double-layer shells, waterproof microphones and speakers, the small speaker focused on adding IPX6 waterproof function.

The use part is the classic voice assistant. The official "5-meter far field, 360 degree pickup, 90% scene 1.5 second response, fast words, hot word interruption, multiple rounds of dialogue, and memory of historical messages" is actually the voice technology on Ticwatch and Tichome before, claiming to join the skill store and skill center developer platform (to be launched soon). What's more special is that for the party scene, the mini speaker adds functions such as NFC fast matching, DLNA and Qplay, and has the function of contacting and quickly connecting speakers under wifi to change songs/grab songs.

The music library accessed by Xiaowen speakers is QQ music, and the body has its own QQ music members of smart speakers for half a year. The cooperation content includes pocket stories, lazy people listening to books, koala FM, Himalaya, dragonfly FM, happy wisdom, Baidu encyclopedia, Baidu Knows, Sogou encyclopedia, etc., and the rest includes Tencent Cloud Microenterprise, children's version of TTS (voice synthesis) launched in December.

Real machine on site

For practical use, in addition to the anodized aluminum alloy edging on the side, the small speaker uses a large area of soft materials. Four LED indicators are hidden under the soft glue on the top, the bottom has anti slip pads, and the replaceable super fiber leather (a kind of PU artificial leather) handle. The small speaker is very light, and it is a circle larger than what it looks like. It is impossible to put it into your pants pocket. In fact, the sound quality of the external playback is OK, but the volume of the engineering machine is low. The volume is a little difficult in the noisy environment of the conference site.

In terms of use, there are four buttons on the machine body: "voice recognition trigger, power on/mute, volume up and volume down", which can be awakened by triggering words of "Hi, Q". In the noisy environment of the press conference, the normal volume can wake up within half a meter. 5. It can also wake up at a distance of 6 meters, but the volume required is higher. The overall performance should not have a problem with the normal household environment. However, the author is more curious about the effect of the microphone after being splashed or even covered by water drops in the bathroom and other scenes.

As a smart speaker, the main functions of ordinary users at this stage are simple weather query, recording and schedule query, and playing music. At a deeper level, it is aimed at children who do not have smart phones (they usually ask adults questions about astronomy and geography) and household equipment control (voice controlled TV, control, socket and other products). This is also the reason why we go out to ask questions and cooperate with intelligent and household appliance enterprises such as Lifesmart, Bolian, Xiaocong Smart, Haier U+, Midea Smart, and Microwhale. In terms of selling price, the official selling price of Tichome Mini speaker is 499 yuan, and the crowdfunding price is 399 yuan. It started at 0:00 on November 27 。

Smart speakers are now worthy of the name of the Red Sea. There are Google Home Mini speakers worth $49 abroad, Xiaomi AI speakers worth $299 in China, and even Tmall Smart speakers worth the lowest price of $49. Even Li Zhifei, who went out to ask CEO Li Zhifei, joked that when the tycoons' money was almost burned, they could confront them head-on 2333.

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