Everyone is doing smart speakers, as the originator Amazon Echo has something to say.

OFweek Smart Home Network News held a week ago at the global developer conference, Apple introduced a new product - smart speakers HomePod. For Apple, the speaker is a brand-new product, but in the industry, HomePod can only be regarded as a latecomer. Before it, Amazon and Google had already launched similar products Echo and Google Home.

Playing music, answering questions, and controlling smart home devices are standard features of smart speakers. When Apple introduced HomePod, it emphasized the importance of sound quality, or hoped to form a difference with the forerunners.

David Limp, senior vice president of Amazon's equipment business, told the media that Apple HomePod is not the same product as Amazon Echo.

In Amazon's view, smart speakers can be seen as life assistants, not as the main function of the speakers. But HomePod built by Apple is digging deep into the sound system of smart speakers.

What is Echo as the originator of smart speakers? How was it created by Amazon? David Limp had given these answers before in an interview with Phoenix Tech.

The idea of ​​creating Echo comes from Star Trek

In November 2014, Echo officially launched on Amazon. But in fact, the idea of ​​creating Echo was earlier, about four and a half years ago.

David Lynp said that Amazon had already started some of its earlier research and development work and discovered some trends that nobody noticed.

The first is cloud computing. At that time, Amazon had its own AWS and was very clear about the tremendous capabilities that cloud computing has. So within the company, Amazon encourages other departments to put their business or products into the cloud.

At the same time, machine learning algorithms have begun to highlight their strengths. Amazon uses machine learning algorithms to make product recommendations for website users and achieves very good results. Consumers like this recommendation very much and also think that Amazon recommends it very accurately.

At this time, Amazon's engineers began to think about where the machine learning algorithms can be applied.

In the end, someone came up with the idea that if you combine cloud computing capabilities with machine learning, you can create a device similar to the movie Star Trek.

The popular science fiction movie “Star Trek” in the 1980s and 1990s opened the imagination of the future world. On a spaceship in a movie, you can ask questions irrespective of where you stand, and then an "invisible computer" will find the answer and answer you.

Echo's first goal is to become a device like the stealth computer in Star Trek.

Alexa is the soul of Echo

David Lynp said that the Echo product itself is very simple, and the smart assistant Alexa is the real soul under its shell.

It took almost three years from the idea of ​​creating Echo to its actual launch. During this period of time, Amazon did not think about how to make Echo look better, but instead optimize Alexa.

As for how to optimize, here are two examples. The first is about delays.

Alexa at the beginning of R&D, if asked "it's time," it may take 5 seconds to hear the answer. This is not Alexa's expectation of an interactive scenario, because in real life it would be strange. Imagine that you asked the next person a question, but he would have 5 seconds to answer you.

Many people think that the question and answer is a simple matter. It is not good to increase the speed of the answer. However, the question has arisen. How to answer it is behind a complex process.

Let's check it out: After the user asks a question, Alexa needs to recognize it as text - send the text to the cloud - be identified in the cloud, identify the user's problem - connect the application that provides time service in the cloud - the application returns the answer - The answer is returned from the cloud - translated into a language to play.

From this point of view, it seems that as long as the efficiency of either link is improved, the response time can be shortened. However, the actual operation is not so simple. For example, in the voice recognition process, we must solve the problem of noise in the real application environment. This is the second example we have to say.

Echo's original prototype worked well in the model room. However, the real family environment cannot be as quiet as the model. For example, in the kitchen of your own home, it is possible to wash the dishes while playing music. Then there are the mixer's voice and the children's loud noise.

David Lynp was very clear at the beginning of the design. If Alexa could only require users to use in a relatively quiet environment like a mobile phone, it would not be possible to succeed.

Amazon has spent many years solving this problem. For example, they improve the device's microphone technology and other related technologies, so that it can better and clearly identify the user's voice; in the cloud let the application perform a lot of machine learning, so that it can filter unwanted noise, and then identify the user's instructions Wait.

Currently, Alexa has shortened the delay from the initial 5 seconds to about 1.5 seconds. Behind this difference of 3.5 seconds, it contains a lot of technical research and development work.

Echo is not just a hardware

Once Echo came out, it became the focus of attention in the industry. Because it is a brand new product and service created by Amazon, it never existed on the market before.

David Lynp said that Amazon created not only equipment but also services. Alexa's services to consumers are completely different from the services it could have obtained through Pad or mobile phones.

Amazon hopes that Echo can be combined with a large number of applications and services while satisfying customers, developers, and Amazon's own needs.

For example, when Echo was just launched, it had very few features. However, Amazon has opened the interface of the Alexa platform. So far, tens of thousands of developers have joined in, and more than 12,000 functions and applications have been developed based on Alexa.

According to eMarketer's data, in the first quarter of this year, the US voice assistant market, Amazon Echo's market share reached 70.6%, Google Home accounted for 23.8%, other manufacturers share the remaining 5.6% market share .

The Amazon, which already has a dominant advantage, has not relaxed its vigilance. Recently, David Lynp made a surprising idea: Amazon will support Siri, Google's assistants and other competing products into their own Echo.

If his idea can be realized, it means that consumers can use Siri and Google's apps just by purchasing Echo. That Amazon can really be called a unified river.

But now, in the field of voice assistants, Google has formed the top four formats of Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana, and these four companies have each launched their own smart speaker products.

The closed ecology built by smart speakers and voice assistants is their respective core competition barriers. I am afraid that no one is willing to break this status quo.

The idea proposed by Amazon may be just to show that Echo is not only a hardware but also an open platform.

Forgot to say that neither Apple's HomePod nor Amazon's Echo currently have plans to go public in China.

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