"Breaking The Circle": A New Way To Open The Intelligent Era

On July 9, the Third World Conference on artificial intelligence officially opened in Shanghai. As the first world AI conference held in the cloud, this year's venue is also full of highlights.

In addition to the gathering of all kinds of bigwigs, at the opening ceremony, the world's first artificial intelligence MV was released at the cloud summit of the 2020 world artificial intelligence conference. Four AI virtual idols, Microsoft Xiaobing, baidu Xiaodu, Xiaomi Xiaoai and bilibilibili Lingyuan Yousa, were dedicated to sing.

As the lyrics say: "I think I can change the world and share a more beautiful home with you." In fact, in recent years, intelligent voice assistant is gradually penetrating into human daily life. More and more smart home devices have been implanted with voice assistant function. According to IDC forecast, by 2023, China's Dialogic artificial intelligence market will reach 1.86 billion US dollars, with a compound annual growth rate of 41.3% from 2018 to 2023.

"Now the whole competition of intelligent assistant is in the early stage of the next explosive growth. I think a key word for the next stage of development of the whole industry is" breaking the circle. " On July 8, around the future development trend of intelligent voice assistant, Jing Kun, vice president of Baidu group and general manager of Baidu intelligent life business group (SLG), judged. From the point of view of "two paths", it is necessary to carry out "two paths" in order to "break through the crowd".

Epidemic "training"

As one of the important carriers of intelligent voice assistant, smart speaker has been growing against the trend during the epidemic.

According to the latest report of smart speakers (q12.20 million) and smart speakers (ssgy) released by the research team of smart speakers (ssgy) and ssgy in 2020, the sales volume of smart speakers will reach 28 million.

Among the core players of global smart speakers, Amazon has long been dominant, leading other competitors. In the first quarter of 2020, it ranked first with 23.5% of the global smart speaker market share, followed by Google. Baidu, Ali and Xiaomi from Chinese manufacturers ranked third, fourth and fifth respectively.

In particular, on the smart speaker track, compared with ALI and Xiaomi, Baidu has achieved overtaking on the curve, replacing Ali as the new leader of smart speakers in China. In the first quarter of 2020, Baidu's shipment volume reached 4.1 million units, an increase of 1% year-on-year; that of Alibaba was 3.6 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 3%; and the shipment of millet was 3.2 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 6%. Among the three domestic manufacturers, baidu is the only one to maintain positive growth.

Compared with other manufacturers, where are the features of Baidu smart speaker?

"In terms of IOT capability, the whole industry will do it, including smart home control, which is a basic ability. At present, smart home ecology will be more and more open. " Jing Kun pointed out, "but this is not the whole of ecology. There is also an ecology in content and service. For example, we will pay more and more attention to the content development of "smooth" and "steady" with us

At the same time, it is also a bonus for the whole industry.

"During the epidemic period, we saw many unexpected signals. Users need to use electronic devices at home, thus forming our industry dividend period," said Jing Kun. "We can see that users' use stickiness and activity of intelligent voice assistant products, such as smart screen and smart speaker, have been greatly improved during the epidemic, and even many users have There's a lot of commercial buying, and that's the user signal we've observed. "

Jing Kun told the 21st century economic report that the commercial purchase behavior of users is mainly the attempt of members and content payment, such as purchasing iqiyi or mango TV members, ordering kaishu story telling, Himalaya and dragonfly FM. "When users get used to this device, the use of stickiness can catalyze commercialization."

The industry needs to break the circle

The epidemic has accelerated the development of the industry, and also made the industry begin to think about the coming new trend. In the past, general product functions can no longer fully meet the needs and experience of current users. At the same time, a single family use scenario also limits the imagination of the industry.

Therefore, in Jing Kun's view, the industry has reached the time point of "breaking the circle", and it needs to cultivate more diversified scenes and more subdivided groups.

There are two ways to break the scene. The first is to strengthen the existing products to specific groups, so that it has a "sharp knife effect" and can tear off the needs of specific users. The second is to break the circle in the scene. In the past, smart speakers and smart screens focused on family scenes, and in the second half of the year, they will focus on breaking through the family scene.

"Breaking the circle now solves the problem between cognition and sticky use, which is purchasing decision." Jing Kun mentioned that the number one reason to buy Xiaodu is friends' recommendation, and the strength of word-of-mouth recommendation is still strengthening. In order to promote the formation of user purchase decision after cognition, it is necessary to let users see that the product ability is more top-notch, the product experience is driven by technology, and the continuously upgraded intelligent service is provided for users, so as to impress consumers.

"What we do is not a hardware product. We want to be a ubiquitous intelligent assistant. This intelligent assistant can be attached to different hardware, and can provide more capabilities to meet rigid needs for specific groups of people." Jing Kun said.

In the first half of this year, we have focused on the development of smart education products for children. In the first half of this year, we have focused on the development of smart education products for children. At the same time, baidu also released a small smart screen air, which covers more family scenes and reduces the threshold of screen smart speaker, and the small smart speaker 2 Infrared version equipped with the first Honghu chip developed by Baidu for far-field voice interaction.

It should be noted that around different groups, Baidu's product strategy is also different. For example, in addition to children, the elderly are also a key user group of smart screens and smart speakers. However, Baidu's solution is to set special modes on general devices to meet the needs of this target group.

"When we look at different groups, the solutions are different. If the general equipment can't meet the requirements, we will try to develop more subdivided products," Jing Kun explained. "But overall, our original intention is to be software and artificial intelligence assistant, so we will be more cautious about developing new hardware product options."

However, despite the gradual maturity of the industry and the increase of commercial purchase behavior, Jing Kun believes that it is still in the investment period, but Baidu has paid more attention to the subsidy content from the past.

"It's more intelligent and more user-friendly than products. We do not rely on hardware harvesting to make money, but in the spirit of service mentality. At present, it seems that subsidies for content can produce word-of-mouth effect and make users' recommendation higher, which has played a very good role. " Kunjing pointed out.

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