5G And AI Support IOT Track Smart Home To Usher In The Era Of Active Intelligence

With the rapid development of 5g and artificial intelligence, smart home has accelerated its transformation from "island type" single product intelligence to "all things connected" intelligent house. Recently, Huawei, Midea household appliances, yunmi and other manufacturers have successively released their new intelligent products, hoping to share the smart home cake under the wave of 5g + IOT.

According to Kaidu data, in the next five years, more than 50% of urban households in China will have smart housekeepers; the average number of smart home devices held by each household will exceed 10, and the market volume will reach trillion level. Especially under the background that the retail scale of China's home appliance market touches the ceiling, smart home and smart home appliances have become the focus of attention.

"Where will smart home go in the next decade?" This is the industry's torture of old and new competitors. According to Wang Xing, President of Kaidu group in Greater China, the future trend of smart home will change to multi scene penetration, product experience iteration, and deep circle operation.

However, Chen Xiaoping, founder and CEO of yunmi technology, always believes that the core of the development of smart home is to use intelligent means to solve problems and create value for users. "Whether through health, safety, or active intelligence, we are all talking about a topic: AI: helpful. It is useful and easy to use. Intelligence should solve problems for consumers. " In his view, the current smart home health, initiative, the development characteristics of the system is around the needs of users.

Return to user pain points

"Intelligence" as a hot word in the new era has attracted the attention of the home appliance industry, and more and more enterprises are constantly expanding their intelligent road. In the past five years, the scale of domestic smart home market has accelerated, reaching 450 billion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 20%. According to AVC monitoring data, the scale of smart home decoration projects supporting residential real estate will reach 2.739 million in 2020, with a year-on-year increase of 21.6%.

After nearly 20 years of development, China's smart home industry has moved from single product intelligence stage to whole house intelligence. At present, the production and sales of intelligent products are very mature. Statistics show that, in 2020, there are more than 242000 smart home enterprises in China, most of which are intelligent single product enterprises with intelligent lock, intelligent lighting, intelligent video and other main business.

In the early years, the excessive pursuit of intelligent function of single product and the lack of interconnection of products have brought bad experience to consumers. Over the years, there has been a consensus in the industry that smart home is not a rigid connection of modules. The essence of smart home is ultimately to serve consumers. As Ding Wei, CEO of Hengjie group, said: "smart appliances can't be intelligent for the sake of intelligence. Only by refining the consumption pain points and adopting intelligent methods on this consumption pain point can we truly and effectively make intelligent services to consumers."

Recently, Haier, Galanz, Huawei, Midea, yunmi and other manufacturers have successively released new smart products or new strategies related to smart home. The 21st century economic reporter has noticed that from the product level, smart appliances are becoming more and more humanized, and the embodiment of their intelligent functions has returned to the essence of consumption, that is, to solve the pain points of users.

Taking yunmi as an example, this year, the company released a new "Ai: helpful" strategy, and launched a number of new AI products, including toilet, water purifier, water heater, air conditioner, etc., to promote the landing of AI technology in smart home from four aspects of health, active intelligence, home safety and natural voice interaction.

"In the era of 5g IOT, AI will become the key to improving the smart home experience." Chen Xiaoping believes that smart home appliances are moving towards a more advanced stage of artificial intelligence. From full house intelligence to comprehensive AI, yunmi's strategic focus this year is to let devices perceive, analyze, judge and take the initiative to solve problems for people.

Coincidentally, Midea's consumer and brand strategy center has recently announced the establishment of a user and brand strategy center, aiming to master user demand and consumption trends through user big data analysis, innovation planning and brand strategy research, so as to provide better services for users.

"Intelligence in the future will enter the era of helping users solve problems and creating value for users, which is the most critical." Chen Xiaoping told reporters that the biggest change in the field of smart home in recent years is the unprecedented increase of consumers' attention. He predicted that "in the next three or five years, the intelligent family will enter a new era."

Cross border ecological Co Construction

Although the market education of smart home has been improved, there is still a long way to go due to the heterogeneous environment of consumer household appliances in the brand. Some research reports have pointed out that the biggest obstacle for consumers to use smart appliances is the incompatibility of products between different brands.

"At present, the smart home market is a mixture of good and bad people, each acting on its own, and there is no unified standard. Each product has become an information island. The preliminary construction of the smart home platform has been completed, and the smart home system needs to be improved." Zhao Meimei, assistant president and general manager of research and innovation Department of Aowei cloud network, believes that smart home should be a home ecosystem composed of hardware (smart appliances, intelligent hardware, security control equipment, furniture, etc.), software system and cloud computing platform based on the Internet of things technology.

Secondly, in this ecosystem, the home equipment can be interconnected to achieve remote human-computer interaction and control. Finally, the device has the ability of self-learning and self adaptation, and can provide users with more secure, comfortable, energy-saving, efficient and convenient personalized services by collecting and analyzing user behavior data.

In order to create a smart home ecosystem that is accepted by the public more quickly, the industry has been exploring. There are two different solutions: one is to create a multi-dimensional product layout to directly provide customers with solutions.

For example, Haier, Midea, yunmi, etc., their intelligent home appliances have covered all kinds of large and small appliances in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, balcony and other scenes, and the product matrix is very tight. Last year, Haier launched its first scene brand sanyiniao. The company has previously disclosed that this year, it plans to speed up the nationwide landing of sanyiniao, and expects to open 1000 more sanyiniao 001 stores in 2021.

The other path is to focus on multi entrance, multi scene intelligent Internet operation platform to be compatible with different brands of products. On April 8 this year, Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei's consumer business software department and director of AI and smart full scene business department, said at the "Huawei 2021 spring all house intelligent and smart screen flagship new product release", Hongmeng system is a lot oriented operating system, and its primary goal is to achieve system unification. On the same day, Huawei cooperated with Midea lot to launch nearly 200 intelligent electrical appliances equipped with Hongmeng system, marking the first time that Hongmeng operating system was launched in the field of intelligent home appliances.

But Huawei's ambition in the field of smart home is much more than that. Just four days later, according to Xu Zhijun, vice chairman and rotating chairman of Huawei, Hongmeng system has attracted more than 20 hardware suppliers and 280 software developers to participate in ecological development. It is estimated that 100 million devices will run Hongmeng operating system in 2021.

Wang Xing pointed out in the sharing of "users are the king" to open the era of intelligent home of the Internet of things. When the scene and demand overlap, the market opportunities will show a blowout growth. "The scene needs that smart home can meet have gone beyond the scope that traditional home products can provide. In the next step, the change of consumption scene will become the starting point and cornerstone of product brand building ecological home

In fact, with the continuous upgrading of intelligent technology, the competitive center of smart home industry has shifted from traditional hardware and product functions to the competition between Internet of things technology and intelligent ecology. In addition to home appliance manufacturers, Internet giants and technology companies have also joined the smart home track, making the industry boundary increasingly blurred.

For cross-border challenges like Huawei, Baidu, Jingdong and other cross-border challenges, some people in the home appliance industry expressed concern, "if the interconnection alliance can not be formed in the home appliance industry, if we all hope to do the moat and barrier, the electrical industry is likely to be cross-border looted by others."

But there are also optimists. "The future lot must be cross-border cooperation. No one can finish everything. We are just at different stages of the industrial chain." In Chen Xiaoping's assumption, the final stage of smart home is "free". Its highly decentralized and app free features allow users to realize freedom of life in the ecology, while yunmi's goal is "one in three parts of the world".