Smart speakers will allow Alibaba to open the door again?

OFweek smart home network news Alibaba also released its own first speaker products.

On July 5, 2017, Ali Artificial Intelligence Labs released a smart voice speaker called “Tmall Elf” at the Beijing Time Museum. A smart voice speaker can be quite different for Ali.

Taobao was established in May 2003 and Alipay was launched in October of that year. Since then, Taobao has overtaken eBay eBay, Yahoo, etc. to become Asia's largest online retailer. Taobao Mall was launched in 2008. It was renamed Tmall in January 2012, and "Tmall Elf" was betad in July 2017.

Ali Qi, the Public and Customer Communication Department of Ali, said, “It feels like the Tmall Genie is a bit like when Taobao just started to develop in 2003. Everything has just started.” From the very ugly web portal of the first edition of Taobao that year, to today’s fine work. Intelligent voice speaker entrance, "Tymon Elf" will become Ali's next evolutionary singularity? In the era of artificial intelligence, how will Ali's evolution path evolve?

In 2016, A.I. Labs was founded and responsible for the R&D of consumer-level AI products under the Alibaba Group. In March 2017, Ali announced the “NASA Plan”, which focused on the research in the core areas to solve the difficulties in the next 10 to 20 years. The "Tmall Elf" as Alibaba's own hardware product, in fact, assumes a hardware function similar to the "spacecraft."

Chen Lijuan, head of the Ali artificial intelligence laboratory, introduced the Tmall Elf conference. The Tmall Elf X1 is smaller than the Amazon Echo and Apple's Homepod. This design is designed to enter the family without intruding. sense. Of course, the slim shape of the Tmall Elf is most likely designed for the size of the Chinese family.

In order to achieve a compact design, Tmall X1 uses the first chip specially developed for the intelligent voice industry. For a working environment that requires a lot of audio processing and sound synthesis, the custom chip adds an independent NEON processing unit to accelerate audio. And voice processing, telephone and voice synthesis, etc., to bring better voice recognition and audio processing effects.

Lynx Genie X1 built-in Chinese human-machine communication system AliGenie, AliGenie actually shared technical achievements with Ali artificial brain ET. Relying on Alibaba Cloud's powerful machine learning technology and computing power, AliGenie has matured as an artificial intelligence system. Therefore, the difficulty of the Tmall Elf X1 is not in the artificial intelligence functions such as speech recognition and intelligent voice interaction, but rather in the business fields that were not involved before Ali, such as hardware design, manufacturing, and supply chain management.

Chen Lijuan said that the reason why Ali did not choose to outsource the way to complete the hardware design, production and manufacturing of the Tmall Genie X1 is because the intelligent voice speaker involves a very complex hardware and software integration and hardware engineering, and is currently on the market to find Less than one company can meet all upstream and downstream parts integration R&D, production and manufacturing, so Ali had to take on the role of this hardware industry integration.

Tmall Elf X1 and AliGenie applied Ali's accumulating technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction.

Based on voiceprint recognition technology, X1 also introduced the voiceprint purchase function, which is also the first commercial voiceprint shopping system.

Alibaba's semantic understanding system also has a memory function and a summarizing ability. It adds a simulation of the "long-term memory" and "short-term memory" functions. It can be used to target the user with different semantics for different scenarios and times. . In addition, Ali artificial intelligence laboratory has also begun research in other languages.

Now, these Ali ecosystems are also open to the outside world with the AliGenie developer platform, including voice technology, service portals, and hardware solutions. They also integrate the rich Internet services and business connectivity capabilities of the Ali ecosystem to provide intelligence to consumers. Experience.

The AliGenie developer platform targets four types of developers: content developers, application developers, smart home developers, and hardware manufacturers. Open core technologies include deep learning, natural language processing, search/recommendation algorithms, knowledge representation, and Reasoning question and answer systems, etc. will be open to developers and hardware vendors free of charge, without having to build AI voice systems from scratch.

As to why X1 is called, Ali said that in mathematics, "X" represents unknowns and variables, and Tmall Elf X1 is the beginning of Alibaba's consumer AI products. It is also full of unknown and variable variables. The first product launched by Ali artificial intelligence laboratory is therefore Named X1.

Since Amazon introduced Echo intelligent speech speakers, the world has turned its sights to the next generation of human-computer interaction: intelligent speech. This year coincides with the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. 10 years ago, the iPhone completely subverted the previous keyboard-based human-computer interaction with hand-written human-computer interaction. When many IT and mobile phone companies stuck to the keyboard interaction, they were eventually thrown out of the stage of history.

Is the iPhone's hand-written human-computer interaction the first for Apple? Of course not, there have been a number of technology companies including Microsoft have developed a handwriting touch screen human-computer interaction technology, but under the PC keyboard thinking rule, no company is willing to believe that a phone without a keyboard will be successful. Apple introduced the first generation of iPhone, not just a choice of technology and product line, but a radical change in the way of thinking and ideas.

How can a mobile phone without a keyboard be successful? Ten years later, the same problem has arisen again. How intelligent is a smart terminal without a handwriting touch screen? If only the intelligent voice human-computer interaction is seen as a technology and product line, it is obviously not successful. Like the iPhone of that year, intelligent voice human-computer interaction is essentially a change of thinking.

How to understand the intelligent voice human-computer interaction is a change in the way of thinking?

Very simple, if a smart terminal only has a microphone and speaker to complete the human-computer interaction, it will lose rich and clear options and space for handwriting and keyboard input, leaving only a very limited choice of dialogue between the upper and lower sentences and Space, this minimalist, limited, and ambiguous approach is bound to force rethinking and redesign of the entire Internet product and ecosystem.

An intelligent voice speaker is just the starting point for this rethinking and redesign process. Only by learning and accumulating user behavioral big data that actually uses intelligent speaker products can it be possible to complete this rethinking and redesign. After the baptism of this process, the next form of Ali could surface.

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