The Internet of Things (IoT) transforms every corner of life, especially in the home—the appliance IoT device allows us to intelligently control door locks, lights, and appliances, connecting personal life with external systems and environments. With the further addition of the current hottest voice assistant functions, the development of smart homes in 2018 is expected to be even higher.
Although SmartHome has been a subject of long-term development, there appears to be no explosive growth in market development. However, with the addition of voice assistants, smart homes are expected to grow even further in 2018. In the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2018, major manufacturers such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, LG, Haier, etc., or home appliance manufacturers, etc. Form alliances and exhibit the latest smart home products.
It is worth noting that intelligent voice assistants, combined with smart appliances, will gradually see more applications and systems that rely on intelligent voice assistants appear in their lives around the world in 2017. This will be a powerful development for the smart home market. kinetic energy.
Voice control injects living water into the smart home market
From this year's CES observation, smart home is still the main development goal of related businesses. According to survey statistics from the city's regulatory agencies, by 2025, 10% of households worldwide will be called smart homes. The market value created by smart homes, according to the GfK report, reached 48.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, and the growth trend has gradually slowed down. It is expected to maintain an annual growth rate of approximately 8 billion U.S. dollars. It is expected that the market size in 2018 will reach 71 billion U.S. dollars. From the point of view of the output value of smart home devices, if smart home appliances and other large devices are not included, the revenue of smart home devices will grow to US$9.5 billion by 2021.
In addition, according to the statistics of the foreign market adjustment agency made by Lin Youkai, a lecturer at the smart home lab, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of smart homes will reach 50% between 2015 and 2020. These growth estimates may be quite attractive to related businesses. However, the continuous growth of smart homes has been invaluable in recent years for high-profile voice control. Although the concept of voice assistant is initiated by Siri in Apple smartphones, Amazon Echo smart speaker is the fastest device to escape the mobile phone, allowing the voice assistant to glow in the smart home, forcing Google and Apple to follow suit. To strengthen its market share and status in the smart home market.
Therefore, it can be said that the new wave of climax in the smart home market is triggered by voice control. Zhang Bowei, an executive of LinkofThings, said that it takes a lot of time for elderly users or heavy users of non-intelligent devices to spend time understanding or operating mobile applications (Apps) or home control panels. Through voice, instructions can be issued more directly and the operation is relatively simple. Therefore, not only smart home related manufacturers are optimistic about the development of voice control in smart homes, but other application fields, including vehicle use, indoor positioning, etc., have begun to introduce voice. Control this technology that is already available but has not been used until recently.
Smart home voice control operation structure
On the other hand, because of the intuitive and easy-to-use features of voice control, consumers are more willing to import smart homes. In addition, Amazon sells Echo Smart Speakers to its E-commerce PRIME members through low-cost subsidies. Although it creates a new online shopping experience, it also contributes to the development of smart homes. In other words, whether it is a platform company like Google, Apple or Microsoft, through voice control technology, more types of smart devices can achieve a greater status in the living space at home and allow more Internet of Things (IoT). ) The device is easier to enter the home field, so the application of the voice assistant not only brings more surprises to the family life, but also leads to more significant progress in the smart home in 2018.
Therefore, in 2018, CES has seen more home appliances, alarm clocks, and other products not only connected to the Internet, but also has features that can be controlled via Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri. Moshe Sheier, CEVA’s marketing strategy director, said that voice is the most natural human-machine interface. It can perform hands-free operations that cannot be touched or gestured, and is therefore an ideal way to control smart home devices. In addition, compared to a busy office or a noisy street, the home is a very private, quiet and confined place, and therefore also more suitable for voice-controlled use environments. Therefore, it is natural to use voice control in homes. .
The most popular smart home voice control devices today are smart speakers, such as AmazonEcho or GoogleHome, and cloud virtual assistants for controlling smart home devices. By connecting smart speakers to other smart home devices, voice control of multiple devices can be achieved, such as providing voice commands, such as "Alexa, please Blink start my home security system." Therefore, with a smart smart speaker can be used as personal audio Butlers are the starting point, smart homes will be more convenient, and they may be more personalized in the future.
However, even if the voice assistant is expected to focus on new development momentum for smart homes, but the voice control alone can make the development of smart home continues to flourish it? Of course not so easy.
Standardization is crucial
Why hasn't smart home previously grown significantly? Chen Junzhi, regional business manager for Nordic Semiconductor, said that even if the industry previously believed that adding devices to the network would definitely lead to the growth of smart homes, in reality, smart homes couldn’t be connected to the network to “sit and wait for revenuesâ€. There are a number of related issues derived from the networking.
Sheier believes that today's smart home devices are single-point devices that incorporate intelligent functionality into the device itself, which can be referred to as "edge computing" or a combination of intelligence and analysis capabilities provided by cloud system software. Popular smart home devices are new versions of traditional household products connected to the Internet, such as thermostats, lighting, garage door remote controls, and door locks. However, most of the existing devices today are dispersed, although they are all in the same wireless network, but there is no connection between them.
In other words, hundreds of networking technologies, which one is the most suitable? All companies naturally have the "best candidate" in mind, but in the same way, they have different networking technologies, and the products cannot communicate with each other. Even the cloud system cannot share common results. The result of "respect for each other" leads to inconvenience to consumers, which in turn reduces their willingness to use. .
Not only that, but smart homes do not have a common cloud service standard that allows industry players to pursue. Terminal manufacturers must follow the steps of cloud service providers and related manufacturers of Netcom products to create products that can be used in the market. However, the industry can give some comfort to the current smart home cloud services available on the market are Apple, Google, Amaon, the three giants, the financial resources of the industry can support the three companies in the product's own smart home standards, but Companies with smaller financial resources can only rely on extraordinary “inspiration†and choose to bet on one.
There is no device that is interconnected into a complete smart home network. Instead of being able to use a single Netcom product to connect to a single cloud for control or information analysis, consumers may have to download an application on mobile phones for different vendors' products or at home. Have to put on different brands of remote control, each time you have to use "guess" to open the application or get the remote control. If you, such smart home use environment, can you accept it?
Consumers do not want to use smart home products, and smart home market development is naturally irritating. However, the situation has begun to change in 2018.
Hundred flowers bloom communication technology standards are convergence
Bo Yun intelligent technology chief Wang Yunlong pointed out that smart homes must be able to be developed in a timely manner to benefit people, that is, the overall ecosystem, connected devices and cloud services must be relatively mature, and the need for a unified standard to eliminate incompatibility issues, plus To overcome the barriers to entry, simple installation steps, and enhance consumer experience, can we have better development.
Prior to this, smart home appliances could be connected through cloud services. However, this is not a 100% solution. Fortunately, major manufacturers have started standardization work and are expected to expedite the resolution of smart home networking devices. Incompatibility issues. Chen Junzhi believes that in 2018, the communication standards for smart homes will not only slowly converge to several mainstream technologies, such as Bluetooth, Thread, ZigBee, or Wi-Fi... Standard single device. As a result, the complexity of product design can be reduced on the one hand, and the products of various manufacturers can be further compatible, and the gateway between the device and the cloud can also be eliminated.
Chen Junzhi explained that the so-called gateway disappears. For example, the handset does not have built-in ZigBee. If you want to control the built-in ZigBee lamps through your mobile phone, or if ZigBee lighting data is transmitted to the cloud, you need to use extra The gateway acts as an intermediary. If a single device supports multiple standards, it means that the device itself can select the corresponding technology according to the work to be performed. If ZigBee control is used, and the data is transferred to the cloud when the data is transmitted to the cloud, the Bluetooth device does not need to be switched to Bluetooth. Through the gateway, the user can also use it more easily, and it can also be easier when building a smart home system.
The industry generally believes that ZigBee has been adopted as the bulk of the current lighting control component, while Bluetooth is the main component if it is required to connect through mobile phones. Xie Jingxiang, senior technical marketing engineer for analog, MEMS and sensing components in STMicroelectronics Asia Pacific, said that observing the development of smart home networking devices at the present stage, it can be found that Bluetooth 5.0 has a mesh and low power. The characteristics of consumption, there is a trend to come from behind, the proportion of built-in Bluetooth 5.0 in smart home devices will gradually increase.
This is not to say that other short-range low-power communication technologies will be completely eliminated, but that the most suitable communication technologies will emerge under different usage environments and gradually converge to only a few mainstream wireless technologies. This is echoing A smart home single device supports the development trend of multiple wireless standards. And this also shows the industry’s ideas, so many technologies, and many supporters. It’s not easy to bet on treasures, and it’s even more likely that only one type of wireless communication technology will be able to dominate, so we will pick out the most likely technologies. Full support in a single chip, or further cooperation with third parties, will be the best way.
In the future, the smart home system will not need to be controlled.
Picking station time comes
After "clearing" the complex wireless technology, there are problems with cloud identification and service systems that need to be resolved. Not only that, most companies are unable to achieve vertical integration from top to bottom. Specialized technologies may only account for a certain part of the overall ecosystem. Therefore, cooperation with multiple companies is required, which will increase the cost and difficulty of product development. This has also caused the industry to face the moment of election.
Zhang Bowei explained that currently the three cloud service providers each have their own cloud service platform, and through voice control of smart home devices, the product needs to support the cloud platform of the three major players, so that the voice control system can accurately identify voice commands. And smooth operation. However, not all vendors have the ability to support different cloud service platforms at the same time. At this time, manufacturers can only choose which voice recognition technology and cloud platform according to the development trend of the market.
It is understood that the current growth of the three giants, AppleHomeKit has been more popular in the first two years, this year is Amazon's leading position. Whether it will be replaced by GoogleHome will become hotter next year, and it is difficult to be accurate. Whether these three major manufacturers will integrate other peripheral product plans beyond the smart speakers is not yet clear, which is also a test of vendors' smart home products. Design layout.
And can voice control technology be standardized in the future? Wang Yunlong believes that whether Dachang is opening up its key voice-related technologies due to the interests involved is still in the undecided days. Maybe the future players will further form a strategic alliance with each other to promote a smart home or voice control technology. However, at this stage, the industry can only use a higher percentage of technology as the basis for selection.
Sheier also observed that the smart home industry began to trend toward consolidation. He mentioned that in the future, these smart home networking devices will continue to increase their interconnections through central hubs to achieve "deep linking." Deep connection also interconnects different products from different vendors and using various application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide a better user experience. For example, a smart home system can reduce the heating temperature, turn off the lights, lock the door, and activate the security system when the doorbell camera recognizes the owner leaving home. The recent acquisition of Ring by Amazon for US$1 billion reflects that smart home solution providers are seeking deeper vertical integration to expand their product portfolio. On the one hand, they hope to lead the smart home ecosystem and on the other hand provide a more seamless connection. Smart home solutions for consumers.
Technology advances to strengthen voice control accuracy
In addition to the convergence of smart home or voice control standards, it is still necessary to consider the technical deficiencies and future developments of voice control technology at the current stage, so that voice control technology can be more in-depth to people's daily lives, and the pace of development can be more stable. .
SimpleCare open long-term intelligent system product design Lin Zhihao said that with smart speakers, most of the users are still used to listen to music, the user's requirements for its accuracy is about when the instructions under the smart speaker, it is relatively Pay attention, which is to be precise when the user speaks.
Lin Zhihao further explained the meaning of “precision.†For example, when Echo issues instructions to play music, if he speaks a few words that are not related to playing music, Echo may not be able to recognize it, but humans can clearly see through the keywords. Know which are the real instructions, and those statements are nonsense. In addition, today's speech recognition technology needs to be strengthened for the ambiguous segmentation, Taiwanese language, or semantic part recognition. This will not only confuse users, but also be a technical problem that needs to be overcome in current speech recognition.
Sheier believes that the latest developments in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and front-end speech processing have made speech control mature and effective. The ASR engine can understand multiple languages ​​and accents, and the voice biometric recognition can be used to identify specific users pre-registered in the system to provide different permissions in the smart home environment. However, the current technology is still limited to a range of 5 meters, and it is difficult to operate in a multi-user environment of simultaneous conversation or noisy.
AI pushes a voice recognition more precisely
The above problem is believed to be solved after artificial intelligence (AI) enters into speech recognition technology. Lin Zhihao believes that natural language processing (NLP) will gradually solve problems such as segmentation, semantics, etc. Because natural language processing has gradually been able to do emotional semantic analysis, certain sentences can certainly be judged to be meaningless “noiseâ€. However, how to successfully add AI to voice control devices will also test the capabilities of industry players.
Not only that, now mainstream speech recognition technology, because the main language use environment of developers is through English, many non-English-speaking countries, when consumers use voice control, sometimes face the situation that the system suddenly “understandsâ€. However, as the ability of artificial intelligence to introduce speech recognition software algorithms is expected to continue to increase, it can be expected that future speech recognition technology will be more applicable to non-English-speaking countries.
MEMS microphone plays an important hardware role
The refinement of software algorithms also needs to be complemented by better hardware microphones to provide better user experience. Xie Jingxiang pointed out that the voice control or smart speaker requirements for micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) microphones are, first, high recognition, sensitivity, microphone performance, and better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
Chen Chengjian, technical marketing manager of analog, micro-electromechanical and sensing components of STMicroelectronics, added that in order for digital or analog microphones to better meet the needs of voice control technology, the industry is committed to reducing packaging, power consumption, and accentuating acoustic overload points. (AOP) performance, and better signal-to-noise performance. Among them, the better performance of the acoustic overload point, the smart speaker in the noisy environment, the sound received will not be too distorted, but also can filter out the background noise.
In addition to identifying software accuracy and hardware product support, voice control technology also faces non-technical challenges. Sheier pointed out that some non-technical challenges such as privacy can be said to be a major concern for consumers. The user may think, "Is the voice control device recording every sentence of my speech?", "Is every sentence I said, will I be heard by the intelligent speaker through the smart speaker?"
In order to eliminate the user's concerns, related businesses are also working hard to develop new technologies to overcome these challenges. For example, separating the words spoken by different users involves the use of complex algorithms to separate each user's voice and understand the direction of the voice stream, knowing which voice commands are involved and which are just background voices. Another upcoming trend is to adopt more on-device edge computing capabilities to enable voice control and voice sensing without cloud system connectivity, thereby improving latency and privacy. Smart speakers and other voice control devices using these technologies will be visible in the coming years.
Lin Zhihao reminded that the non-technical challenges will be to escape the smart speaker to all special products, such as the user interface on care, assuming that they are used by single-headed elders. Is there a way to connect the user-friendly, so that the elderly can also be “ Painless use? For example, the voice to language conversion, whether to connect to the network cable, telephone line or plug in the SIM card to keep the network communication signal flow? In addition, the technology of connecting to the Internet is also very important.
In this regard, Chen Junzhi stated that wireless short-distance networks in smart homes will first compress packets when transmitting voice packets to facilitate smooth transmission of their existing bandwidth speeds. Some of the above technical and non-technical considerations can be solved through software and hardware. However, users consider the non-technical aspects of the voice control technology. The key to adopting the technology is security.
Security is an important consideration
There are many reasons for the impact of voice control technology into smart homes or other applications, including whether users’ habits have been established, whether they provide additional value beyond “control†functions, whether there are more “special†applications, and security. Sexual problems. Among them, security can be said to be the most concerned part of consumers.
Chen Junzhi explained that voice control involves the part of network transmission, which is bound to cause consumers to doubt their security. However, each transmission technology now has its own unique encryption and decryption method, and there are also related chip companies who focus on the development of security chips. It should be able to solve consumer concerns. What's more, today's hackers will choose to "use" their content to do intrusion, capture, or crack actions. General home appliance control command voice may be less attractive to hackers.
Zhang Bowei added that not only are hackers worrisome, smart speakers can ignore erroneous instructions, or identify the correct speaker, such as children's mischief, under orders, thieves use voice to open home locks, etc. Headache safety issues. At this point, the importance of voice control combined with voiceprint identification can be demonstrated. It is still at this stage that whether Voiceprint recognition at the entrance of the voice recognition system of Dachang is added to the terminal product. However, adding voiceprint recognition can not only improve the security, but also allow product manufacturers to introduce more "personalized" proprietary products, so it can be expected that voice control products incorporating voiceprint identification technology will appear in the market in the future.
To escape the future of the field of control in the longer term
How will intelligent home voice control change in the future? Where do the killer apps appear? The industry generally believes that voice control can be turned into two-way communication if it is more than just passive radio and instructions, and can provide more information, such as giving weather advice to users, offering recipes, etc., or not. Limited to a single smart speaker, but dispersed in multiple devices, to further solve the problem of control commands can not "over the wall" transmission to another room, so that users will be more willing to use.
Lin Zhihao believes that the majority of voice control applications today are based on the weather, calendars, phone calls and music. On the devices other than mobile phones, speaker control is almost the bulk. However, the current situation has changed a bit. For example, from AfoBot and Asus Zenbo, we can find that from a single speaker product to a robot product, although the amount is still small, gradually differentiating can be found. The emergence of products.
In addition, voice control in home care, as well as indoor positioning with “listening†can also be expected to have more room to play; and BMW also announced that it will install Alexa in 2018 models to help drive more traffic. In the situation, driving will no longer be a mess. Xie Jingxiang pointed out that smart homes, besides voice control, will have more room for development if they are combined with visual applications. If the doorbell can combine voice and face recognition, it can provide multiple security guarantees and it is expected to increase consumption. The degree of acceptance.
Since the only use of the smart speaker is to serve as a voice assistant and to take charge of the role of central control as a family center, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) predicts that smart speakers will still have 1 to 2 years of explosive growth. The US market will begin to decline in 2020, globally. The market may not begin to decline until 2022.
In order to allow voice control technology to go a long way, Amazon has opened the Alexa cloud architecture to those interested in the big voice control market, allowing a large number of low-level networking devices to import Alexa, from personal computers and smart phones to smart TVs. All kinds of devices can listen to instructions. Therefore, when the voice assistant penetrates into other mobile devices in a large amount, the smart speaker will no longer be the only voice portal in the home. Even so, the move will allow the voice assistant to become a “non-essential†technology for consumers.
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