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How Data Can Activate Smart Speaker Market

Date : 2022-08-15     View : 740

In 2014, the Amazon Echo speaker first combined voice interaction with the speaker, allowing the speaker to realize functions such as making calls, setting alarm clocks, and checking the weather. Voice interaction brings users a new experience, and Amazon has always occupied the largest market share in the smart speaker industry by virtue of being the first to enter the game.

Inspired by Echo, Dingdong, the first smart speaker in China, was born in 2015. At the same time, three Internet companies, Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi, have also quietly built up their efforts. In 2017, three smart speaker products, Tmall Genie, Xiaodu and Xiaoai, were launched one after another. The addition of the three BAM giants also officially opened the prelude to the "burning money" war of smart speakers.

However, the good times are not long, and the overall market growth rate of smart speakers gradually slowed in 2020. In 2020, the sales volume of smart speakers in China was 37.58 million units, a year-on-year increase of 3%. Among them, the third and fourth quarters decreased by about 5%-10% year-on-year. According to the latest "China Smart Speaker Retail Market Monthly Tracker" report released by Luotu Technology, the overall sales volume of China's smart speaker market in May 2022 was 2.15 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 26.6%. So why has the growth rate of smart speakers slowed and what challenges are they facing?

The growth rate of the smart speaker market is in a downturn

Affected by the epidemic, the consumption desire of the public has been greatly reduced, and the operation of offline experience stores has been affected, which will further seriously affect the user experience and desire to purchase. Under the new normal of the epidemic, all industries are facing the same challenges and dilemmas. The reason for the slowdown in the growth rate of smart speakers is also related to the maturity of the product itself. From the point of view of the product itself, although it has the name of "smart" with a full sense of technology, it still needs to be improved in terms of the use experience of voice interaction and the sound quality of actual music playback. Especially in terms of the accuracy of recognition, the integrity of the dialogue content, etc., such as the answer content is not what you asked, the semantic expression is not satisfactory, and so on. At the same time, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the accuracy of multilingual recognition, children's speech recognition, elderly speech recognition, dialect recognition and mixed language (Code-Switch) speech recognition.

How to "turn red" in the future

The above technical barriers are also the main reason why Apple released HomePod 15.6 to push its own products again. Recently, Apple pushed the official version of HomePod 15.6 software to HomePod and HomePod mini users. Added Siri voice recognition support for Mandarin Chinese (China, Taiwan), Cantonese (China, Hong Kong), and Japanese (Japan). Siri recognizes the user's voice to play the user's music, ask Siri a question, or complete a personal request. This feature adds multilingual speech recognition and speaker timbre recognition, which greatly refreshes the user's favorability and further increases market share. Since the current speech recognition technology of smart speakers is based on deep neural networks, a large amount of labeled data is needed as the cornerstone of training, and the importance of data is naturally self-evident. Magic Data currently has 400+ data sets covering different industries, different regions and different scenarios, covering 60+ languages and dialects, which can be applied to various common voice interaction scenarios such as human-computer interaction, intelligent voice assistant, and intelligent cockpit.

In the long run, the smart speaker market still has great potential. In the domestic market, parents are paying more and more attention to education, which will provide huge market potential for smart speakers that can assist the education market. At present, the penetration rate of smart speakers in domestic households is about 20%, and there is still a broad sinking market in third- and fourth-tier cities still waiting to be developed. At the same time, vertical markets such as education, mother and baby will also have more opportunities and demand for use. Breaking the technical dilemma through the support of high-quality data and creating more competitive products will be the only way for smart speakers to become popular.

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