Artificial intelligence and the Internet are actually a bit conflicting

Many companies have strategic departments, but no matter how many PPTs are written, many Chinese companies' strategies can usually be summed up in one sentence: What do Americans do, what do we do! According to this logic, it is very likely that 100 smart speakers will appear this year, because the most popular CES is Amazon Echo, and the final outcome of these 100 smart speaker companies is likely to be very different from the results of the Hundred Regiments. In order to see this problem, we need to recognize the fundamental conflict between AI companies and Internet companies in terms of tonality. To understand this kind of conflict, we must first return to the product itself.

Artificial intelligence and the Internet are actually a bit conflicting

Jingdong + Xunfei did not work, why do you do it?

Anyone who wants to do Echo-like smart speakers in the Chinese market can't avoid a very fundamental problem: Jingdong + Xunfei's embarrassment is not too successful, why do you succeed?

Ancient people’s military methods always speak of singularity, and they can borrow this perspective when looking at products like Echo. The product itself has a basis (functional basis). This is positive, regardless of ID, interaction, publicity or innovation in price. The former guarantees fundamentals and the latter guarantees differentiation.

From this point of view, the "positive" of products such as Smart Speaker is the music attribute of the speaker itself. The oddity is whether the voice interaction is convenient enough (the back can be decomposed into speed and precision), whether it can arouse everyone's curiosity, whether there is a Enough and influential people stand on the platform. From this perspective, the success of such products for large companies is actually a function of determination and patience:

The speaker is an existing category, and the voice interaction makes the interaction more convenient. That is to say, the upgrade brought by the smart speaker actually adds a positive new feature to the existing function. As a result, there is only one core obstacle to the success of this category in terms of product perspective: whether the new features of voice interaction really make the experience better or just a statement. If it is really good enough, it is equivalent to spending the same amount of money and buying a better one.

Difficulties are difficult at this point. Core requirements are difficult to achieve in terms of voice interaction.

When we were doing computers, many of our companies played the role of assembly. When playing mobile phones, the role played by the mobile phone was advanced and more customization work was added. However, the technical thresholds of these two types of living bones are actually not high. Therefore, the grinding cycle required for the product is short, and the market is relatively mature and easy to obtain rapid positive feedback. The company is also determined to be firm and firm.

Let us look at the example of Xiaomi:

On April 6, 2010, Beijing Xiaomi Technology Co., Ltd. was formally established.

On August 16, 2010, the first beta version of MIUI was launched.

On August 29th, 2011, Xiaome Mobile's 1,000-unit engineering commemorative edition began to be released.

On September 5, 2011, Xiaomi officially opened the online reservation, and booked more than 300,000 units in half a day, which was a major success.

The whole grinding cycle of the product is about one year. There are two kinds of positive feedback: one is the positive feedback obtained on MIUI, and the other is to book more than 300,000 units in half a day. Once the latter feedback emerges, it will be more confident to expand the results, whether it is the CEO or the capital. To sum up, this is two steps:

The first step is to customize the combination on a relatively mature system (Qualcomm + Android).

The second step is to get positive feedback from the market and increase investment.

If you compare the smart speakers, you will find that the gap is still quite large.

The first is not a relatively mature software and hardware system, but everyone is exploring. In software, it is hard to rely on the maturity of other people to make Chinese voice interaction into Android. It must be that Chinese companies have taken the lead. If this is really done, it will be able to handle the problems of domestic operating systems that we have called for many years. Because the hardware is also a new thing, there is no mature production chain to support you. Many people estimate that it is the first time that there is another kind of thing called the microphone array in the world, and there is also Beamforming to direct the radio.

Second, because of the problems mentioned above, Echo products are unlikely to get positive feedback from the market quickly. As a pure new thing that must rely entirely on its own technology, the initial experience is most available, and then it needs to be polished, but the initial sales are not likely to be high. This is very different from the wave of playing style that our Internet has cultivated. Under the wave of playing, everyone always wants to win. I will buy and sell a hammer. I will increase the investment, but it actually requires even If you don’t sell so much, you have to keep investing.

Watching is just another new product, but the new category of Smart Speaker actually challenges the culture, methodology and technology of Chinese companies as a whole. In summary, there is no shortage of smart speakers in China, and there is no shortage of smart speakers. The only thing that is lacking is to continue to invest in products. In the image, if you do it with Elon Musk doing SpaceX, then this can be done, but to do it in a gesture of melatonin, it is still a trick.

Less imagination and PR, more attention to problems

The core problem in the field of AI is that there are too many imaginations and PRs, and there are too few landings. It is not impossible to land, but the long period of landing has caused some people to have insufficient interest in this. This is usually not a personal issue, but involves deep conflicts in the company's culture. Suppose we are in a fast-paced company. All KPIs of the company are based on this. After that person enters the company, he has only two choices: one is to really make slow-paced products, endure long-term no results, and may be halfway through. It has also been killed; the second is to think of ways to get out of the game quickly and avoid being too embarrassed from the perspective of his boss. Obvious PR is an effective means of relieving paralysis.

If a company really wants to do artificial intelligence, there must be at least two issues that must be addressed, and both require relatively high strategic patience:

Scope and open field

We can always prove the power of artificial intelligence in an extremely narrow field, such as maps, standard environment speech recognition, chess, and the strongest brain. But this is the same as the computing speed of people and computers. It lacks a practical meaning. It is ok to do PR, but it is not good to make products. If the dialog system is limited to answering only 100 questions, then the previous hard coding can be done very accurately, but that obviously will not be of value to the user because the adaptation range is too narrow. If you want to land AI, you must completely solve all the problems in a sub-area, so that you can contribute to the product. For example, accurate music is a sub-area, and independent obstacle avoidance and walking is a sub-area. Jian Huang is a sub-area. At the moment, it is still difficult to create a general-purpose intelligence, but if you want to use it, you can't be alone, but you are good at classifying pictures. Solving sub-domain problems is commercialization, image classification, etc. are technical studies, and there is a gap in the middle.

Algorithm, data and atom

The technical requirements of products are always highly integrated. This is particularly evident in voice interaction. When speech recognition and natural language understanding require productization, you cannot restrain the user from turning off the TV and others cannot speak. When speaking, you must have a 90-degree front product, you must set the speaker volume to be small enough, and so on. That kind of product can't be used. In other words, if you really want to do a good job, you must break through the boundaries of atoms and bits, complete the entire chain, and integrate the acoustics, speech recognition, and semantic understanding systematically.

The better the first point is solved, the more realistic the impact of artificial intelligence will be. The better the second point is, the faster the artificial intelligence will land. For the moment, the core issue is to solve the second problem. If you don't solve it, you can't digest the previous technology dividend. No matter the point of solving it, we need a little original spirit. Just as we said before, we suddenly rushed to the forefront of the world. Everyone is running the same line. Compared to mobile phones, we don't have Qualcomm, MTK, or Android. When Dr. Chen Xiaoliang, the CEO of our company, was interviewed, he often said that the positioning of the company is the Qualcomm and MTK under the voice interaction. It is often difficult to understand why the above background is such a type of enterprise. Especially practical.

If you want to think about it, you can think about it here.

Since so much investment, is this worth worth noting? Is it really rich to earn or will it be as lively as O2O but hard to make money?

This is actually a point that has to be played, because the things that voice interaction will subvert are actually much more than what is seen on the surface. Here is just a little.

Let's make a basic assumption first, that is, Alexa has achieved great success (Echo, smart speakers, Alexa are related, but in fact it is different things, as mentioned in the previous article, it is not repeated here), infiltrated into each Among the devices, people's lives are surrounded, people spend 50% of their time dealing with voice and equipment, and they are approaching Android.

At this time, there will be such a demand, the user will say: Alexa, help me to inform Ma Huateng, I will not see him tomorrow. At this time, you need a communication IM to achieve this demand. At this time, Amazon has two choices: First, it accesses an existing IM, such as Whatsapp, or Skype. The second is to do it yourself in Alexa. Amazon has at least half the chance to choose the latter, rather than opening up this infrastructure to others because the first two are either Facebook or Microsoft. If Alibaba made Alexa in China, it is estimated that 100% will not choose to connect to WeChat. In this way, with the core features of a voice interaction, subversive things appear:

The various applications hidden behind the voice interaction are unique.

It's hard to imagine this kind of voice interaction: Alexa helped me with a message to Ma Huateng with Whatsapp, and I won't see him tomorrow. In the voice interaction, the identity of applications such as WhatsApp is likely to be optimized. If Alexa is still only a million-level, tens of millions of DAU applications, then this feature is not critical, but if it is a 1 billion DAU system, then the impact of this feature will be infinitely magnified, that is, search, IM, E-commerce is likely to have only one, not as small as it is now, but there are 1, 2, and 3.

summary

The road to artificial intelligence is actually a little longer than thought, which is not limited to technology (previous technical dividends can bring enough opportunities), but also limited by cultural and cognitive conflicts. At least in the startup phase and in the past few years, the Internet classic style of play has been somewhat out of place. At the same time, there will be strong enough subversive forces behind him, and the temptation is indeed strong enough. It seems that 2017 is destined to be a year ahead in the entanglement.

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