How to commercialize and become a ultimate test for each player
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “100 million Internet” (ID: i-yiou), the author is Bao Jie.
For Baidu, the most fearful thing is to miss it again. Once it didn’t keep up with the development rhythm of the mobile Internet era, it not only lost from the BAT Internet Big Three camp, but now it’s 36 billion The market value of the US dollar has not even caught up with much, and its position in the entire Internet echelon has been continuously downgraded.
After starting the full bet on the artificial intelligence track in 2017, Baidu urgently needs a turnaround to return to the rising development track, trying to win the first wave of artificial intelligence waves to regain control of the industry’s right to speak, in C In terms of landing, the most important and hottest branch is the smart speaker. From the results of the current stage, the victory of the smart speaker after the war may be bitter.
The domestic smart speaker passed the initial stage of the hundred-box battle, to the blood-splitting subsidy price war to stimulate sales, from the screenless speaker to the form of the screen speaker PK, eventually formed by Baidu, Ali, Xiaomi, etc. The three-legged situation.
Although the smart speakers are considered to be a non-rigid category from the beginning to the end, they are not very popular with consumers as the manufacturers of the various manufacturers touted. However, in the context of such a big company’s “strong push”, the market sales have successfully broken through thousands. Millions of magnitudes, according to Canalys’ most optimistic forecast, China’s smart speaker market is expected to reach 59.9 million units by the end of 2019, which has a scale effect.
Baidu also wanted to do some high-end and profitable smart speaker products. In February 2017, it purchased the Raven Technology to supplement the hardware gene and launched the raven H smart speaker, but the price was as high as 1699 yuan. Compared with the 100-yuan speakers of Tmall Elf and Xiaomi at that time, there was no market competitiveness, and the final sales were bleak.
In order to quickly catch up with the sales gap, Baidu later chose to join hands with the startup company Xiaoyu at home. In March 2018, the smart video speaker was released at the “small home” to make a differentiated selling point, and the market counterattack was quickly launched at a price of 599 yuan. The sales volume has gradually improved. In the later period, the main products were exported with small size. The series of smart speaker products with a price of less than 1,000 yuan and even less than 100 yuan have been successfully boosted the market sales.
2019 is a “turning year” of Baidu smart speakers. Baidu not only smashed out from the speaker battle, but also gradually won the top spot in sales. According to the statistics of Canalys, in the first quarter of this year, Baidu became the first in the domestic smart speaker camp with 3.3 million units of shipments, and in the second quarter, it once surpassed Google smart speakers to become the world’s second. With a volume of 4.5 million units, Baidu is finally out of date.
From the perspective of shipment rankings, Baidu seems to have sat in the leading position of the domestic smart speaker track in China, but on the other hand, the “meaning” of this victory is worth considering, from Baidu. This year’s falling market capitalization can also see some attitudes in the capital market. This victory has not played a role in reversing Baidu’s decline.
Smart speakers are still a category that relies on subsidies and price wars. If you don’t make money or even lose money, you want to end the price war. How to commercialize it becomes the ultimate test for every player.
For Ali, the capital strength is strong, the e-commerce channel and the cloud service have ecological advantages, and the ecology and channels can be played;
For Xiaomi, the smart speaker is just a small ring in the IoT platform. Through the combination of many eco-chain products, it can not only digest the cost but also boost the sales output of the linked products, which can afford the price/performance ratio;
But for Baidu, it is almost the fulcrum of the lifeline of its artificial intelligence on the C side. If you put in half of your life, you have to gamble and win. The higher the sales, the higher the cost of the previous investment, except for the content and In addition to some application skills, how to achieve a return to the book through smart speakersThe large-scale profitability of the promotion is the biggest problem facing Baidu.
Baidu Vice President, Baidu Smart Life Group (SLG) General Manager Jing Wei once proposed three commercialization attempts at the Baidu Developer Conference in 2019, such as small VIP members, paid skills and brand skills, etc. In order to transplant some of the Internet’s style of play, in a product category that is not just a demand category and the depth of interaction is not very strong, such a way of realizing seems to be somewhat idealistic.
In addition, from the perspective of smart home, smart speakers, as the first large-scale mobile interactive products, have been regarded as home interaction centers when they first became popular, but nowadays with AI voice interaction technology Widely popularized applications, as well as upgrade iterations of smart homes and smart home appliances, voice interactive portals are rapidly diversified and distributed, and the use scenes of smart speakers are constantly being divided.
For example, in the living room scene, the smart TV and the intelligent switch panel all have voice interaction functions. Through these entrances, the intelligent lighting of indoor lighting, air conditioning, curtains, etc. can also be controlled. In practical functions, smart speakers are increasingly being Marginalization, even in the home scene for security and privacy considerations, many localized voice solutions are more popular than networked smart speakers.
Baidu smart speaker does not occupy too much advantage in the field of smart home. In the process of communication with many manufacturers who have integrated smart home integration, they have never understood that their strategy for smart speakers has never been fixed. For smart speaker products, the common practice is to open up the smart speaker ecosystem of multiple brands for users to choose flexibly.
According to many smart speaker products that have been used for a long time, smart speakers are still a partial experience. Due to the bottleneck of NLP and NLU technology, users often feel that smart speakers are not smart or even “stupid”. It is an obstacle that cannot be solved in a short period of time. Even though Baidu is a search technology and has accumulated a lot in AI technology, smart speakers can’t reach the level of intelligence far beyond peers. It is difficult to open the gap between the essence and often because of network environment problems. Causes a bad experience in interaction.
Whether it is a screenless smart speaker or a smart speaker with a screen, from search, content, skills, interaction, entrance to cash, Baidu expects that smart speakers carry too many things, and the huge artificial intelligence technology system behind it must pass. Such a non-required product category to output, the smarter speaker to be more “heavy” may overestimate the carrying capacity of the smart speaker.
Winning the smart speaker battle is to win what is the bigger ecological strategic goal is a big chess, from Ali, Xiaomi to Baidu are different, maybe e-commerce, cloud service ecology, maybe IoT, smart home However, one thing is certain. It is not very meaningful to simply compete for the staged sales of the smart speakers and the world rankings. What is the return and the ecological boost will be the key to the second half of the smart speaker competition..
For domestic smart speaker manufacturers, the surge in sales that is not proportional to input and output is sometimes a glare of data, but it is also very likely to become a quagmire that is deeper and deeper, and it is difficult to extricate itself. The smart speaker track is not necessarily able to win the AI era, but may miss more overtaking opportunities because it consumes too much on this track.