Why can Dingdong, the smart home portal that Google and Apple are competing for, monopolize 80% of the industry's sales?

On July 26, Wu Yifan, who showed off his freestyle handsomeness, attended the Xiaomi press conference, causing the whole audience to scream. However, those who really understand know that the part of this press conference that is really worth screaming about is precisely the seemingly silent smart speaker that Xiaomi has just launched - although it can understand and respond to whatever you say.

Xiaomi came a little late. JD.com had already launched the Dingdong series of smart speakers in 2015, which achieved the miracle of being able to understand whatever you say within five meters.

The smart home ecosystem based on voice interaction technology has become the deciding factor in whether Chinese Internet companies can succeed in the future.

Smart home is big business

Smart home has quietly become a 114 billion business in China, with more than 46 million active users, and is growing rapidly. According to iResearch Qianfan's forecast, by 2019, China's smart home market will reach nearly 200 billion.

Although China's smart home market is still in its infancy, its scale is already astonishing - roughly 1.3 times the size of China's carbonated beverage market. In 2016, all Chinese people consumed 84.9 billion yuan worth of carbonated beverages (mainly Coca-Cola and Pepsi).

In the face of this huge smart home business, smart speakers, which have become the control center of smart homes at this stage with their natural voice interaction advantages, naturally stand out. Products launched by international giants including Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePad have all entered this market. The latest news shows that Facebook will also launch its own smart speaker next year.

Foreign giants are thriving, but due to the inherent weakness of Chinese voice recognition and semantic analysis, the products launched by Internet companies such as JD.com, Alibaba, and Lenovo are more suitable for China's national conditions. After all, there are very few Chinese people who are used to sending commands to smart speakers in English. In addition, China is a vast country with different dialects in different places, and only Chinese voice systems can recognize it.

In fact, the sales data of JD.com’s smart speakers show that the domestic smart speaker market has initially taken shape and established. In Q4 2016 and Q2 2017, the sales growth rates of smart speakers reached highs of 63.2% and 37.6% respectively.

What is more worth mentioning is that according to the "2017 China Smart Speaker Industry Analysis and Development Report" recently released by iResearch, the sales volume of Dingdong smart speakers on JD.com has accounted for 80% of the total sales volume of smart speakers, once again leading the domestic smart speaker market. Wei Qiang, CEO of Linglong Technology, a joint venture between JD.com and iFlytek, said that the sales growth rate of Dingdong this year is more than 100%.

Dingdong has almost "monopolized" the domestic smart speaker market, and companies including Alibaba and Xiaomi can only compete for the remaining 20% ​​of the market. One brand occupies one market, a scene that only appeared 30 years ago when supply was based on tickets.

The reason behind this is, on the one hand, naturally inseparable from JD.com's foresight into the prospects of the smart speaker market, which gave the Dingdong smart speaker, which was launched in 2015, a clear first-mover advantage. On the other hand, after years of development, JD.com's leading position in the smart speaker field from product standards to market systems has also laid a solid foundation for JD.com's identity as a game-changer in smart speakers.

Dingdong masters core technology

In fact, with the first release of Amazon Echo and domestic Dingdong smart speakers, more and more people have seen the potential market dividends of smart speakers, and more and more brands have followed suit. According to statistics, there are currently more than 40 companies in China that make smart speakers.

It is also obvious that making a speaker with voice function is not difficult, but making a good smart speaker is not easy.

It is understood that before the advent of the Dingdong smart speaker, iFlytek, as a top domestic voice technology company, had been conducting research and development and accumulation in far-field voice technology for several years. It is with the help of the far-field recognition technology provided by iFlytek and the 8-microphone array installed on the top of the speaker that 360° voice signal collection is achieved in space, so that the voice interaction distance of the Dingdong smart speaker can reach 5 meters and the recognition rate is guaranteed to be above 90%, making it the only product on the market that supports ultra-long-distance voice interaction of 5 meters.

In addition, the absolute advantage of Dingdong smart speaker products is also reflected in the fact that iFlytek has introduced deep neural network technology into speech recognition.

Through high-precision acoustic model and language model training based on massive training corpus, combined with ultimate decoding engine engineering technology, the large vocabulary continuous speech recognition rate reaches more than 95%, and the command word recognition rate reaches more than 99%. The decoding engine can give results within 40 milliseconds after the user speaks, allowing Dingdong smart speakers to truly "understand in seconds".

Why Dingdong smart speakers can continue to lead

In the US smart speaker market, Amazon Echo can be regarded as the most successful smart hardware product to date, but the influence of overseas brand smart speakers in China has always been minimal.

In its report, Analysys also pointed out that foreign smart speakers are not well accepted in China, mainly due to the gap in product localization services, the understanding of Chinese phonetic semantics, the copyright of Chinese music content, and scenario-based services.

The reason why Dingdong smart speaker can stand out in the domestic smart speaker market is inseparable from the functional expansion based on its core technological advantages. It has achieved full coverage of intelligent voice interaction functions from music, audio book sharing, daily information query, to voice shopping, home control, etc. Not only has it made the product the first speaker in China that can perform voice shopping, it is also one of the few full-function intelligent voice interaction terminals in China that covers almost all usage scenarios.

At present, Dingdong smart speaker has more than 150 services and its own developer platform. Its partners include music content platforms such as Baidu Music and Himalaya FM; offline service providers such as ZTO Express and E-bag Wash; tool products such as Baidu Maps and Youdao Cloud Notes, as well as services provided by JD platforms such as JD Communications and JIMI Robots.

In addition, through the full empowerment of JD Alpha smart service platform, Dingdong and JD Weilian smart home are connected. Dingdong speaker backend has connected more than 1,000 smart home devices, covering 21 categories such as lamps, air conditioners, TVs, kitchenware, etc., and can be connected and controlled across platforms and brands, truly realizing "Dingdong opens its mouth and I have all the smart things."

When smart speakers are smart enough to allow you to send a package or turn on the air conditioner without using your hands and operate it directly with voice, there is no doubt that users who own this type of product will be more willing to actually use it in their lives.

According to existing data, the daily user activity of Dingdong smart speakers is 25%-30%, and the monthly activity reaches 70%. The user usage rate on the next day is as high as 75%. The user usage rate within a week remains at 55%. The average daily usage time of users is two hours, and the corresponding retention rate is 40%. It is a product with high stickiness among smart hardware.

Dingdong leads the entire industry into the intelligent fast lane

Looking at the development history of audio equipment, we are experiencing an iterative stage from traditional multimedia speakers to Wi-Fi/Bluetooth wireless speakers, and then to the current smart speakers with voice assistant functions.

Since 2015, in an environment where the domestic smart speaker market has experienced high quarterly growth on many occasions, Dingdong smart speaker has become the best-selling product with the largest market share, which means that it has laid the foundation for the operating model of smart speakers in China. At the same time, as the first product to enter the field of smart speakers, it has also explored a path for sustainable development that is easy for users to accept for latecomers. From a certain perspective, if other brands of smart speakers want to gain high recognition in the market, they will inevitably imitate and copy the operating model of Dingdong smart speakers.

In essence, the important factor for the success of Dingdong smart speaker is that it perfectly integrates the five accessible advantages in the smart speaker industry chain through intelligent means, namely, the voice interaction technology advantage provided by iFlytek; the content advantage provided by Baidu Music/News; the third-party service advantage provided by E袋洗 and ZTO Express; the platform advantage provided by JD Intelligence and JD Alpha platform, and the channel service advantages brought by JD Mall, offline experience stores, self-built warehouses, and delivery robots.

However, having the industry's rare advantage of the entire industrial chain does not mean that Dingdong Smart Speaker intends to push the domestic smart speaker market into a monopoly.

As early as April last year, Dingdong jointly launched the "JD Smart Audio Alliance" with JD.com. In the early days of the alliance, 19 first-line brands such as Philips, Edifier, and Elvis signed up to join.

At the product basic technology level, Dingdong will export the "JD+ Intelligent Audio Solution" to alliance members, work together to lower the entry threshold for intelligent voice recognition applications, and promote IoT applications to consumers. At the same time, it will also provide audio manufacturers with support in technology, production, sales, etc., break down production chain barriers, connect upstream and downstream companies in the industry, and solve the various problems currently faced by manufacturers in one stop.

JD.com also proposed in its theory of the fourth retail revolution that this revolution is guided by the transformation of retail infrastructure. JD.com has built an open and complete intelligent empowerment platform. It has the obligation and ability to lead hardware companies into the intelligent era through technical solutions and alliances, and create new growth points for the intelligent industry.

It can be seen that Dingdong's value to the smart speaker industry is evolving from a simple star product to an industry promoter. The deepening of its brand influence from point to surface is accelerating the arrival of a new era of intelligent voice using smart speakers as an entry point.

The flapping of a butterfly's wings over Amazon is enough to cause a hurricane over Texas. However, the smart speaker trend that blew from Amazon was created in China by Ding Dong. How Ding Dong will continue to lead the industry in the future is a question that JD.com's smart speaker will have to "ding dong" itself.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.