What smart speakers do Chinese users really want?

OFweek’s smart home network communication smart speaker doesn’t resemble a smartphone, which is a product that almost every household needs. So, what do Chinese users truly require? As domestic internet companies gear up, how should smart home terminals be designed? These are questions worth pondering.

Chinese users’ perceptions of smartphones and smart speakers seem to fall into two dimensions.

On one hand, within just a few short years, China has reached the forefront in terms of both the scale of smartphone users and the level of manufacturing. We can proudly say that there are numerous innovations based on the mobile internet platform here, even surpassing the ocean of innovation in Silicon Valley.

But on the other hand, the category of smart speakers hasn’t developed domestically like Amazon Echo. For Chinese users, this category remains a tool primarily for early adopters to experience, rather than something as practical as Echo.

Does this seem like a negative thing? Is it because users aren’t forming habits? However, people didn’t form habits when smartphones first appeared either; were there no demands for the family? However, voice interaction is indeed more convenient than touch in certain scenarios.

What’s the reason? Smart speakers are not products that every household needs like smartphones. What do Chinese users really need? After domestic internet companies ramp up their efforts, how should smart home terminals be shaped? These are all questions worth considering.

Find a “key” and open a family

Being able to realistically solve a specific problem is the first step to product success. This is particularly evident with Amazon Echo.

In 2014, as everyone remembers, was the year of Echo’s release. This is the first year of intelligent speaker development that many recall. But many might have forgotten another significant event that occurred that year: Google spent $3.2 billion to acquire Nest, the renowned smart home brand.

Nest Labs, founded by former Apple engineer Tony Fadell, known as the “father of iPod,” has been a star in the U.S. tech industry since its establishment in 2010 with its extremely well-designed intelligent thermostat, Nest Learning Thermostat.

This product can add an intelligent temperature adjustment function to home air conditioners without altering traditional appliances, and it also has self-learning capabilities. As long as the user manually adjusts the temperature during the first week of use, the thermostat can then gather and analyze this data, performing intelligent temperature control thereafter.

It can be said that Nest has essentially created a smart home terminal device for American families. At that time, even though most home appliances hadn’t yet become intelligent, people had already experienced smart home products. It was also in this year that Echo was born, as it could connect and control Nest’s capabilities via voice, immediately surprising people with the idea of “voice-controlling air conditioning temperature.”

Due to the American home design and appliance usage habits, voice-controlling air conditioners, electric lights, and other devices is often more time- and labor-saving than finding and controlling the switches manually. Therefore, Echo allowed people to understand from the start the convenience it brought to family life. It actually solved a very difficult problem: How to find greater advantages than traditional interactions in people’s family settings? This issue wasn’t resolved after the emergence of smartphones, so after the advent of Echo, this problem found an answer—easier control of appliances through voice, even if they weren’t smart products.

Echo’s other way to open the family was music. Americans love listening to music. The service of audio content has always been available. Listening to music anytime in the home has been an important requirement. This point existed even before the emergence of smart speakers.

Statista previously conducted research on the use of smart speakers by U.S. consumers. According to its report, the three most common actions users perform on smart speakers are “common problems” (60%), “check the weather” (57%), and “listen to music” (54%). It can be seen that the demand for music services among U.S. users is an important reason why Echo became a household essential.

In addition, according to reports from research organization Voicebot, as of July 2, 2017, Echo’s skills had exceeded 15,000, but from the perspective of user numbers, a large number of applications were at no one’s interest level. Among the top ten skills, five were related to voice content, such as “playing a meditative or relaxing sound,” “playing a short bedtime story,” or even “thunder.” These sound requirements suggest that smart speakers play a significant role in the bedroom.

Smart home habits + music services, these two cores create a key to opening the American family, and Echo’s popularity in the U.S. is understandable.

American Key and Chinese Door

In the U.S., these two important reasons for Echo’s development have been awkwardly left behind in China.

Firstly, the acceptance of smart homes in China isn’t as high as in the U.S., although in the past two years, people have begun to use various smart products, they still can’t escape fragmentation and a fragmented trend. Clearly, you can’t control other home appliances on the MiJia app, and you can’t use Alibaba’s smart speakers to control MiJia products.

The reason for this fragmentation may be that the intelligent process of the domestic home appliance industry wasn’t as fast as originally anticipated, but the more crucial point is the great temptation to build a closed ecosystem. Whether it’s BAT or JD, for Amazon’s eco-enclosed ecosystem built with Echo, although it’s a long-term goal that many yearn for, further attempts are still necessary. At this year’s nodes, these companies hope to change our living habits again through technology.

In addition, Americans and Chinese have different ways of enjoying family music. “In China and the U.S., music consumption isn’t the same. Americans listen to music via streaming platforms, whereas China is more about on-demand. Therefore, the demand for voice in the U.S. isn’t particularly high, while Chinese consumers will be very high. Once recognition fails a couple of times, everyone might feel disappointed and deem it useless.” Song Xiaopeng, founder and CEO of Shenzhen Mitang Technology, shared some of his thoughts with Geek Park. “Americans have the habit of paying for music and are willing to pay for music content. It took a long time in China to gradually develop such understanding.”

Mitang Technology began exploring the possibilities of speaker interaction as early as 2014. In the year of Echo’s birth, Mitang Technology developed the interactive speaker Sugr Cube with unique interaction, not only adopting a minimalist design but also trying to avoid complexity. The same creativity in interaction allows people to enjoy music in the most tactile way through touch and tilting. Sugr Cube also won the Kickstarter Editor's Choice Award.

As China’s first Spotify-certified company, in 2016, Mitang Technology also reached an agreement with Amazon to become an Amazon-certified Alexa system solution provider. They developed a complete set of software and hardware-integrated voice interactive product solutions. With this sense, and this year reaching a strategic cooperation with Tencent, for years of exploration in audio interaction and product experience, Song Xiaopeng believes that in China, speakers need to be used as smart terminals to control everything around them. What are the interaction scenarios? How large is the demand and how does the path go? Through practice, explore:

“The family environment in China and the U.S. is very different. Americans have large houses, making it convenient to manually control switches without voice, but in China, houses aren’t so big. Manually controlling switches isn’t troublesome. The kitchen is similar; American kitchens are quieter during cooking, making voice interaction more natural in the kitchen.”

In his opinion, on the battlefield in China, it may be necessary to differentiate themselves from Amazon Echo by successfully educating the market and cultivating people’s habits. It’s a good way to infiltrate the problems that Chinese people will encounter in a localized manner. Thus, we can see that the market has started different ways of exploration: whether it’s shopping, making calls to meet needs like the Tmall Elf X1, or from the depth of the combination of Xiaoya AI speakers, these are all domestic attempts.

These different subdivided scenarios and the ability to allow speakers to “understand” the user and then feedback from different paths is the ability to open the door to “Let everything hear.” Perhaps this is the real domestic capability for smart speakers to take root.

We should find our own key

“Dream A Dream” has a scene that deeply impressed me. After the protagonist, Daxiong, always threw things away and forgot to bring things together, Doraemon found a magical spray from his many gadgets that could make objects around him capable of speech.

So, when you forget where something is, these items will automatically respond to you. In my opinion, this is the initial portrayal of the smart speaker. It’s always around you and can meet your needs when you need it.

So, looking at this year’s smart speaker boom, we may not only have a deeper understanding, that is, under the domestic environment, the function of the speaker doesn’t have to be grand, basic functions such as setting alarms, calendar reminders, and checking the weather are enough. Try to focus on more user-oriented features.

Once the subdivided functions are established, people will probably become accustomed to smart speaker products. It’s like listening to a novel and a story. What you need is a speaker focused on reading content. If you need shopping, you need a speaker that focuses more on shopping. The first step in “everything we hear” is to avoid the vaunted but ambiguous function of letting people understand what the speaker can and cannot do, perhaps with more intuitive results.

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