BATJ, Xiaomi, and Lenovo all attended the event with great fanfare, and the press conferences were held one after another, which was quite lively. As a traffic entrance, building an ecological platform, and becoming a home terminal, smart speakers are expected to be popular.

However, when the number of solution providers in Nanshan District of Shenzhen soared to hundreds, gold diggers with a keen sense of smell realized that startups had become supporting roles in the story.

• Consumer market: This is destined to be a game of many players competing for the market. So, Lao Wang, who started a business of smart speakers three years ago, led his team to transform into a technology solutions company.

• Supply chain: For the tiny profits of orders, OEM factories are scrambling for each other, and even willing to pay millions of yuan to make a loss. "In the end, I work for big companies for nothing. Anyway, I have decided to give up this wave," said Lao Zhou, who has been working in the Shenzhen supply chain market for five years and is unwilling to wade into this muddy water.

• Investor: "There are differences in user habits between China and abroad, and domestic market demand is not rigid. I am pessimistic about the domestic market," said Zhao Nan, executive director of Xiangfeng Investment, indifferent when talking about smart speakers. This is also a typical response from investors.

Based on the tracking survey of online Taobao (including Tmall) sales data, the overall monthly sales of smart speakers are less than 20,000 units. The investment market that does not believe in pie-in-the-sky sales says, "Market data speaks for itself, and paper talk is meaningless."

Big players are pouring in, the capital market is cooling down, the supply chain is in a passive position, entrepreneurs are looking for other ways out, and sales data is bleak. Who will finally decide the outcome of this "speaker dream" accelerated by artificial intelligence?

The official rise of the domestic smart speaker market began in the second half of 2016, which was the ripple effect brought about by the sharp increase in sales of Amazon Echo.

• Three years ago, Amazon released its smart speaker Echo, and the market for smart speakers with integrated voice assistant system Alexa began to ferment. Until last year, Echo's sales data began to make a qualitative leap, exceeding 5 million units in one fell swoop, becoming the best-selling small home speaker in the United States.

• A year ago, Google launched a similar product, Google Home.
  

• In May this year, Apple released HomePod at WWDC. At the same time, a large number of Internet manufacturers, including Xiaomi, Lenovo, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, were not to be outdone and enthusiastically launched smart speakers that were almost identical in appearance.

• In addition, peripheral players such as Himalaya, Kugou, and Cheetah entered in different ways.
  

• Home appliance brands such as Haier and Midea are in urgent need of testing new technologies in small-sized home appliances, and there are more than 20 entrepreneurial teams.

According to Slice Intelligence online statistics, Echo sales experienced a blowout starting in October 2015 and reached a climax in November.

▲E2015 sales data trend Source: Slice Intelligence

Of course, the speaker form factor is not the key. What attracts many players, especially big players, is that Amazon has opened up the intelligent voice system. In half a year, it has connected with 7,000 manufacturers and has been almost omnipresent at the CES booth in the United States. So far, Alexa has more than 15,000 skills. The emergence of successful precedents shows that the platform imagination behind smart speakers is huge.

The entry of giants and the rush of small and medium-sized manufacturers have increased the possibility of the smart speaker market becoming a hot spot.

According to incomplete statistics, there are nearly 50 companies engaged in smart speakers, and many companies that are in progress or are less well-known have not been counted. In addition, there are at least 500 related hardware companies or technology providers active in the forefront.

The gameplay of the players who come in can be roughly divided into the following categories:

• Domestic giants want to build ecosystems, find new entrances for existing content and services, and make a lot of money;

• Content providers began to unite with other companies to "band together for warmth" and conquer the market;

• Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs specialize in their own areas and provide technical or hardware support to seize opportunities and strive to carve out a way to survive.
  

At the same time that Amazon launched the Echo smart speaker, a wave of domestic players also launched WiFi speakers, such as iFlytek Smart Speaker X1, Dianmang WiFi Speaker, Xiaozhi Super Speaker, etc.

iFLYTEK

Take iFlytek's X1 as an example. It was launched at the end of 2014. It can connect to the Internet via WiFi, control the device through a mobile phone APP, and access different audio resources. In terms of positioning, this wave of speakers is still limited to the product level, and does not regard the speakers as an interactive entrance for a family. However, the high price, cumbersome operation, low intelligence, etc. have led to a poor user experience. In addition, the proportion of domestic users using speakers is not high, and Bluetooth speakers are also grabbing market share. This wave of WiFi speakers has not received much attention and recognition from the market.

Li Haibo, general manager and vice president of Himalaya Hardware, once said that he has seen more than a hundred smart speakers. In Shenzhen Nanshan District alone, there are hundreds of companies providing hardware or technical solutions within one kilometer. Many of these hardware companies turned to the smart speaker trend when the PC market was in a downturn. Regardless of how many will survive after the great waves, their existence and activity also reflect the current domestic smart speaker craze.

Giants led by BAT and JD.com are at the top of the industry chain and have a lot of resources. They are trying to launch smart speaker products to occupy the interactive entrance of the home. They all hope to build an ecosystem dominated by themselves through speakers, so as to control the huge data value on the platform. In addition, their layout of smart speakers is also to find the future interactive entrance, carrying their advantages in e-commerce, services and content.

JD.com

JD.com was the first company in China to learn from Amazon. In early 2015, it established a joint venture with iFlytek, Linglong Technology, to develop the Dingdong speaker. In August of the same year, Linglong Technology launched its first smart speaker. Currently, its official cumulative sales are 1 million units. Although it is the best-selling smart speaker in China, it is only 1/10 of Amazon Echo.

This speaker is not just a speaker, but the "entrance" to the whole family. To this end, JD.com organized a "plan" and took the lead in inviting iFlytek, a big voice technology company, to jointly develop products and launch the Dingdong speaker. After that, the new JD.com Microlink was launched, and currently there are 500 home appliances on its platform, which can be controlled by the Dingdong speaker.

Alibaba

In August 2015, Alibaba and Philips jointly launched the Ali Xiaofei WiFi speaker. Although it used keypad voice control at the time, it was a step towards a home interactive terminal. On June 8, Alibaba Group Vice President Liu Song said that Alibaba and Himalaya FM are also working together to launch smart speakers with AI capabilities. Alibaba has the largest e-commerce platform, so will Alibaba give up such an entry point to home shopping?

Baidu

At this year's CES, Baidu Duer and Xiaoyu at Home jointly released a new generation of Xiaoyu at Home robot based on the DuerOS system, attempting to make the video call robot a benchmark product, occupy the entrance to home interaction, and thus open up its search and commercial services.

It is also understood that Tencent is also actively developing smart speakers.

The evolution of human-computer interaction is a topic that Internet giants like to talk about recently. From the PC era to the mobile Internet and then to the AI ​​era, our interaction methods will also evolve from keyboard and mouse to touch screen and then to smart voice assistants.

Not only Internet giants and established home appliance companies are making smart speakers, but operators are also involved. Among the three major operators, China Mobile and China Telecom are known to have cooperated with third-party speaker manufacturers to develop and produce related products.

When it comes to this, we must mention a group - the Shenzhen hardware "army". Yes, they are an important part of this wave of smart speakers. Too many speaker hardware or technical modules come from here. And Huamei Xingtai (Shenzhen) is a representative of Shenzhen hardware companies.

In June 2017, Huamei Xingtai (Shenzhen) Company won the bid for China Mobile's IOT-HUB + smart voice assistant speaker project, with a bid amount of RMB 30 million. The core person in charge of Huamei Xingtai said that they have been researching and developing smart speakers for three years. Except for the voice recognition using iFlytek's technology, they are also doing everything from speaker hardware, software, semantic definition and content access themselves.

Huamei Xingtai is one of the earliest hardware companies in Shenzhen to make smart speakers. The company was founded in 2009 and previously engaged in the research and development and production of routers and mobile power supplies. At the end of 2014, smart speakers began to enter the domestic market, and Huamei Xingtai turned to this field. It is precisely by relying on the first-mover advantage and hardware accumulation that the company has cooperated with Baidu, LeTV, ZTE, etc. The person in charge said that they have also suffered for a long time, but the real spring will not come until next year. In addition, he also revealed that not only China Mobile is making smart speakers, but China Telecom is also doing it.

Back to China Mobile itself, this is its first smart speaker project, which will integrate China Mobile's andlink smart home protocol and Migu Music resources. Coupled with China Mobile's earlier deployment of the Internet of Things OneNET open platform, it can be seen that China Mobile has been aiming for home standards and platforms from the beginning.

However, we need to reflect on whether China Mobile, which almost outsources a speaker product and integrates its own software and standards, can provide users with a good user experience? However, from the perspective of China Mobile's layout in the Internet of Things, smart home is only one part of it, and the role of smart speakers is to build standards, so as to connect products to its cloud platform and realize the transformation from operating traffic to operating data.

In the competition for the smart home market, traditional home appliance companies are a force that cannot be ignored, especially the old-brand home appliance companies. The wave of the Internet once suppressed their brilliance, but now facing the clarion call of smart home, they are once again shouting their cry for technology to the world, demonstrating their ability to keep pace with the times. This is true for Haier, Midea, Changhong, as well as small and medium-sized smart home and home improvement companies.

Haier

Haier is undoubtedly the most eye-catching one in this wave. At this year's CES Asia, Haier demonstrated its progress in the U-home ecosystem, smart bathrooms, smart kitchens, etc., and it is also making smart speakers. A product manager of Haier U-home told Zhidongxi that Haier is also working with partners to make smart speakers, which are still in the siege stage and have not yet been launched.

However, Haier did not put all its hopes on smart speakers as the entire home entrance. The person in charge of the product said that Haier is working on "whole-house voice", and smart speakers are just one scenario for family interaction.

Haier has currently launched corresponding terminal products, such as smart refrigerators and "magic mirrors" for bathrooms, but has not yet added voice interaction. It is expected that a voice interaction module will be added to the next generation of products. This can be understood as turning other home appliances into another form of "smart speaker" interaction entrance.

In addition, in order to enable smart speakers to gain more capabilities to control home appliances, Haier, while partially following the OCF standard, is also actively building its own home standards in order to gain more control in the smart home field in the future.

One of the biggest concerns of content providers is being constrained by channels. The best way is to build their own channels and entrances. Currently, Himalaya and Kugou have launched related speaker products based on their own content.

Himalayas

On June 20 this year, Himalaya FM, together with Orion Star, Rococo and Jiahe Smart, launched the "Xiaoya AI Speaker". Xiaoya AI Speaker is a full-content speaker. Orion Star provides core voice technology support, Himalaya is responsible for content and hardware implementation, Rococo provides design and Jiahe Smart is responsible for hardware production. It is a collaborative product.

As Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu Sheng said, true AI should not only be about technology, but also be a product that can be integrated with life, truly solve user pain points and satisfy user experience. As a full-content speaker, whether Xiaoya Speaker can gain more users in the portal war requires deep exploration of the connotation of "accompany".

The "game" formed by Himalaya and several other players shows us how content providers build a smart speaker and how they "band together for warmth" and participate in the competition for entry while surrounded by giants.

Many small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs are the other side of the world. Often we cannot see their existence because they are more of a part of the big companies, providing technology or hardware and then putting other labels on them. However, they also have their own survival rules.

Currently, more than 15 startups have launched their own smart speakers, such as Rokid's Pebble speaker, Juen Technology's Xiaozhi Super Speaker, Mobvoi's Tichome smart speaker, and Wenzhi Technology's Maibao smart speaker. In addition, there are many small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs who provide hardware and technical solutions.

Wenzhi Technology said that there are two purposes for launching speaker products. One is to showcase technology to attract some project cooperation; the other is that some existing home improvement and home furnishing companies have demand, and the products can be directly connected with these companies.

But when asked about the problems with smart speakers, the person in charge of Wenzhi Technology said that technical bottlenecks can be solved with the iteration of technology, but the biggest problem at present is that the smart speaker market is too small and users have no habit of using them.

Moore Acoustics is a Shenzhen-based technology solution provider that specializes in far-field algorithms and hardware. A person in charge of the company said that they produce the far-field voice and peripherals of Baofeng's smart TVs, and they are also working with Tencent, Baidu, iFlytek and other companies to develop hardware and smart speakers.

100,000 units, this is the overall sales volume of Dingdong smart speakers in 2016. The data comes from the "2016 Annual Report of iFlytek Co., Ltd."

According to the marketing staff of Ding Dong Speaker, by the end of June this year, the sales of Ding Dong Speaker had increased by 130% year-on-year compared with 2016. However, based on the annual sales of 100,000 units, this figure is still not ideal.

On JD.com, when searching for "smart speakers", 13 of the top 15 models in terms of sales volume are Dingdong speakers, and 2 of them are Kugou speakers. This result is not actually of reference value, but only shows that "100,000 units" and "130% growth" are not easy to come by.

According to Taobao (including Tmall) e-commerce platform, with "smart speakers" as the search category, a 30-day sales data survey found that there were more than 21 stores with monthly sales of more than 100 units, covering a total of 15 brands (excluding OEM manufacturers), with a total sales of 17,645 units.

▲ Smart speaker online sales ranking

1. In terms of sales ranking distribution, the top-ranked Xiaomi Internet Speaker, Chiguan S1 Bluetooth Speaker, and Kugou Pandora Speaker are all priced between 150 and 400 yuan; the fourth-ranked music flower pots are mostly OEM products, with prices below 150 yuan, and win with their unique shape and function.

2. In terms of product intelligence, it mainly refers to the realization of voice interaction function. Among the 15 brands with monthly sales of more than 100 units, only two Xiaomi Internet speakers, Philips aw6005/Xiaofei Ali smart speakers, have realized voice interaction function, and it is only used in some scenes when switching songs. To some extent, this also proves the current tastelessness of voice interaction function.

3. On the price side, SONOS PLay5 and SONOS PLay1 occupy the head space, and their main functions are still focused on sound quality and experience.

4. Based on the monthly sales data of Taobao (including Tmall) e-commerce platform, the total number is 17,645 units, which is used as the base to obtain the sales market share of each brand. Xiaomi's Internet sales accounted for 26%, and the overall share of the top three exceeded half. The market participation of other brands is relatively low.

▲ Distribution of online market share of smart speakers

Overall, the online data of smart speakers based on the domestic market is not optimistic. At least, the stock market with monthly sales of less than 20,000 units and annual sales of less than one million units is difficult to support the large-scale investment mentioned above.

If it were two years ago, the data of the smart speaker market might be even more tragic. In the past few years until now, smart speakers have not really taken off in the consumer market. The current smart speaker stock market is less than one million units, and it may take until the next year or two for the real volume to take off.

"There are 112 companies engaged in voice intelligence within one kilometer of Nanshan District in Shenzhen." This is how Li Haibo, general manager and vice president of Himalaya Hardware, describes the supply chain situation.

However, Lao Zhou said: "This is a solution that can be accepted by factories with backgrounds and only care about beautiful production lines. They have been cheated by Internet companies in recent years! They were cheated by LeTV before, and last year VR was cheated by Baofeng."

Lao Zhou has long seen through the "routine" of the Internet trend that changes every year, and has become much calmer and more cautious. When the trend arrives, orders come in one after another, but once the market cools down, a large amount of overcapacity and the production line resources invested in the early stage can only be digested by the supply chain itself.

According to Lao Zhou, since major Internet companies have already made arrangements, all domestic OEM factories of a certain scale have received tasks. However, compared with the production capacity of OEM factories, "it is still a business with too many people and too little meat, and in the end it is the ordinary manufacturing and processing companies that are pitted."

The core of the problem is that the supply chain has been in a passive state for a long time due to being tied to large companies. "The gross profit is low, and they even make a loss. Most factories with backgrounds only need beautiful production lines." In this process, the supply chain is often suppressed and capital recovery is slow.

Xiao Yang from the marketing department of a mature solution manufacturer said, "The competition in the smart speaker solution market is already quite fierce. Because the solution is relatively mature, the market has begun to sell in large quantities at low prices, and some customers mainly look at price when making comparisons."

According to Xiao Yang, it is common for big customers to delay payment, which results in a slow return of funds for the company. "Generally speaking, we need to advance 70% of the order amount, and the customer prepays 30%. When the order volume is greater than 10K, the advance payment exceeds one million." This is one of the reasons why Lao Zhou is unwilling to "play" with big companies.

"If Alibaba places an order for a smart speaker with a monthly MOQ (minimum order quantity) of 100k, a payment period of 6 months, and no advance payment, do you think anyone will take it?" Lao Zhou asked himself and answered, "Of course there will be! But we can't take it. In fact, the payment period is not a problem, and a third party will advance the payment. But the key is that the product has no profit. Basically, it's just working for nothing in the end."

This is the frustration of the OEM factory. But it does not mean that the brand side is free of risks. "Amazon Echo and Tmall Genie in China can adjust the price at will. Do you know how much shock it will cause to the solution providers?"

Wang Yu's company also encountered this problem. At the end of 2015, he joined the company, which had been developing in the audio field for several years. Like various manufacturers encouraged by Echo, they also believed that the trend of smart speakers had arrived.

"At that time, there were no mature intelligent technology solutions in the market, and voice interaction technology was not as popular as it is now. We built a so-called 'smart speaker' based on the model of intelligent robots (18.560, 0.04, 0.22%) at that time."

In Wang Yu's view, that product was the smart speaker he had in mind at the time. "You can talk to it and it can actually respond. It can also be controlled through Bluetooth, WiFi, App, etc. It has all the necessary functions."

Soon, the company organized the production of tens of thousands of such smart speakers and quickly launched them on the market. At the beginning, they were able to attract some purchases; but the good times did not last long, and sales fell rapidly in the following months. "In the first month, we could still sell thousands of units, and then hundreds of units, and then we could not sell them anymore. So far, the company still has thousands of products left in the warehouse, and no one is interested in them.

This attempt brought great losses to Wang Yu's company, but they were not the most unsuccessful players.

"As far as I know, there are many companies that originally made tablets or mobile phones, but they changed their brands and switched to making smart speakers; these companies only sold a hundred or so units a month and simply couldn't make it, so they closed down after a few months," said Wang Yu.

Large companies have their own technical preparations in advance, and they can respond immediately when the trend comes; we can only follow them, step by step. In this wave of trend, the initiative is not in the hands of small companies. In this process, due to the high technical threshold of smart speakers, the technology is still concentrated in the hands of large companies; and it will take some time for the technology to sink step by step. "

It is expected that it will take two or three years before small businesses can enjoy the benefits brought by the transfer of technology from large enterprises.

In May this year, Amazon Echo experienced a price cut across the board, including Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Tap, all of which were reduced by US$30-40, as well as the 499 yuan Tmall Genie released this month. These have had a significant impact on OEM factories, meaning that plans with higher costs will be overturned.

As mentioned above, the current domestic market stock of less than one million units cannot support the influx of giants and entrepreneurs. If this bubble bursts, who will pay for it? What are the stop-loss models?

“With a large influx of new products coming into the market, there will definitely be many cases of failure in the future. But for large companies, the amortized R&D investment in making a speaker is not large; small companies are not recommended to build a platform, as the front-end microphone array and back-end semantics are both good entry points,” said Liu Weiwei, partner of Galaxy Internet.

There is no demand for voice interaction in Chinese people's living habits. This is the biggest market barrier. The domestic market does not have rigid demand. The improvement of the ecosystem is indeed inseparable from Internet manufacturers. However, looking at the hardware development history of BAT, without exception, none of them has achieved scale.

The main reason is that Internet companies lack hardware genes, supply chain capabilities, hardware design capabilities, and consumer electronics sales channel capabilities. As for existing players, Alibaba and Tencent, which have complete ecosystems, are favored, especially watching the opening of the WeChat portal. However, they do not necessarily appear as hardware brand manufacturers, but are more optimistic about branded speakers and consumer electronics manufacturers.

In addition, the improvement of supply chain capabilities is also an important condition. The supply capacity of chips and memory will be sufficient to support the sales explosion in 2018.

Appendix: Inventory of smart speaker chip manufacturers

MediaTek - MT8516

In the mobile phone processor market, MediaTek is in a difficult situation under the pressure of Qualcomm in the United States, and a series of negative news such as revenue decline and large-scale layoffs have also followed. However, in the smart speaker chip market, MediaTek has raised its head and is reported to have supplied nearly 80% of the chips in the smart speaker market in 2016.

In fact, MediaTek was already a supplier to Amazon when Amazon released its first smart speaker Echo three years ago. After MediaTek's 2017 shareholders' meeting this year, the company's chairman Tsai Ming-kai said: "MediaTek is one of the main chip manufacturers for Amazon's smart speaker Echo, accounting for more than half of the shipment share." In addition, MediaTek is also the chip supplier for Essential Home (the "smart assistant" launched by Android creator Andy Rubin's new company) and Tmall Genie X1 released this month.

During the Google I/O Developer Conference in May this year, MediaTek launched the MT8516, a system-on-chip designed specifically for smart voice assistant devices and smart speaker products, with the intention of further consolidating its leading position in the field of smart speaker chips.

MT8516 supports quad-core 64-bit ARM® Cortex-A35™ with a main frequency of 1.3GHz. The chip also has built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0, which not only ensures a smaller chip footprint, but also helps terminal manufacturers simplify design, speed up time to market, and provide more possibilities for developing more creative products.

MT8516 supports up to 8-channel TDM microphone array interface and 2-channel PDM digital microphone interface, which is very suitable for far-field microphone voice control and smart audio equipment. In addition, the chip also provides a variety of storage specifications, including LPDDR2, LPDDR3, DDR3, DDR3L and DDR4, to meet a variety of platform requirements.

Qualcomm - Smart Audio Platform

Seeing that its old rival MTK is thriving in the smart speaker market, Qualcomm will naturally take action. In June this year, at a developer event in Shenzhen, Qualcomm officially launched its "Smart Audio Platform". On this platform, Qualcomm provides two new system-on-chips (SoCs), based on the Snapdragon 425 (APQ8017) chip and the Snapdragon 212 chip (APQ8009), which are optimized for audio processing.

In addition to the chip itself, this new platform also provides developers with more development tools. The purpose is clear, that is, developers can use these tools to create hardware products like Amazon Echo more quickly. The two new chips will provide support for two voice assistants, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa; they can also support voice recognition and Internet phone (VoIP).

Qualcomm also has some new improvements in basic music playback. The new amplifier technology is configured on another system-level chip CSRA6620, as well as a new voice development kit, which is aimed at high-end audio products, such as speakers and headphones. In addition, Qualcomm previously had a solution called AllPlay, which allows users to play the same song in multiple rooms through streaming, or play different music in different rooms through partitions. These two smart audio system-level chips support Google's previously launched Internet of Things system Android Things and Linux, and are expected to be launched in the third quarter of this year.

It seems that Qualcomm has saved developers who want to make smart speakers a lot of engineering time, but what it ultimately wants to do is the chip business. It wants to win more orders not from Google and Apple, but from Android phone manufacturers: it wants to make the design and manufacturing of smart speakers into a business similar to Android smartphones.

Intel – Smart Home Hub

Previously, Intel missed the smartphone chip market due to its slow action, allowing Qualcomm and MediaTek to gain a monopoly, and Intel itself has been frowning in the field of mobile chips. Now Intel has also begun to focus on the smart speaker market.

At the Amazon Developer Conference at the end of last year, Intel said it would develop a smart speaker based on Amazon Alexa's "Smart Home Hub" (Chinese meaning "smart home hub"). Intel is a company whose main business is chips, and its purpose in developing this smart speaker is to promote its own chip products. The company said in a statement that Intel's prototype reference design will help external hardware manufacturers accelerate the development of various Alexa-based voice devices and use Intel's chip platform. According to reports, this smart speaker will support a variety of network connection methods, including Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, etc.

According to a report in May this year, Microsoft announced at the Build developer conference that Cortana devices are supported by HP and Intel, but it is not yet known which company will eventually manufacture the hardware products. According to Microsoft, it has signed a cooperation agreement with HP to produce products and a cooperation agreement with Intel to provide a reference platform for Cortana devices.

Apple – A8

At WWDC in June this year, Apple officially released the smart speaker HomePod with integrated Siri, which will serve as a center to connect the entire Apple smart home. Apple's products are willful. HomePod has a powerful A8 processor built in, and its computing speed is actually the same as that of iPhone 6, so it can perform excellently in sound field setting, noise reduction and voice recognition. The bottom of HomePod is equipped with 7 array-type precision beam sound chambers and uses SIRI for voice interaction.

Allwinner Technology——R16 chip

As early as 2015, JD.com launched Dingdong, a smart speaker with integrated iFlytek voice assistant, which used the R16 chip (Cortex-A7 quad-core architecture) from domestic chip manufacturer Allwinner Technology. In March last year (2016), iFlytek launched a 4+1 ring-shaped five-microphone array, which also used the Allwinner R16 platform.

Allwinner R16 uses a cost-effective quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 architecture processor with powerful computing performance and rich interfaces; supports Linux-based open source system Tina (Tina is a system software brand created by Allwinner Technology specifically for Allwinner smart hardware platform); supports AirPlay, DLNA, Qplay, Airkiss, Smart Link and other network application protocols; provides unique algorithms and IP packages, allowing developers to focus on their own applications and product market operations, reduce product development costs, and shorten development cycles.

▲ R16 chip block diagram

Rockchip——RK3036, RK3229

In April 2017, Rockchip Electronics of China announced its two "AI Voice Assistant" chip-level solutions at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair: RK3036 and RK3229 chips, which are voice smart speaker solutions for entry-level and mid-to-high-end products respectively. And they have started shipping in the first quarter of this year. On May 17, at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Rockchip Electronics (Rockchip) took the lead in releasing the RK3229 Google Assistant solution based on the Android system platform to the world. The cooperation between Rockchip and Google is also slowly leveraging this market.

According to official data, RK3036 is based on Cortex-A7 dual-core and supports 1/2/4Mic; RK3229 is based on Cortex-A7 quad-core and supports 4-8Mic. In terms of voice algorithms, it supports sound source localization, sound source enhancement, echo cancellation, and noise suppression technology. RK3229 is also the first chip solution to support 8-way digital I2S digital silicon microphone direct connection, which not only greatly saves costs, but also is compatible with different microphone array algorithms and platforms.

Unisoc——RDA5981

Unisoc is also making rapid progress in the market. Currently, smart speakers equipped with the company's chips have been shipped on a large scale, and have begun to vigorously harvest the low-end smart speaker market below 300 yuan. In a media report, a spokesperson for Unisoc said: "We currently have dozens of speaker customers, mainly smart and Bluetooth speakers below 300 yuan, and the chip price cost is very competitive."

RDA 5981, which uses a 40nm process and has a built-in ARM Cortex-M4 processor, is a fully integrated, low-power WiFi chip designed for the Internet of Things, including smart homes, smart families, and intelligent voice interactions.

RDA5981 supports 802.11 b/g/n HT20/40 mode, and integrates ARM CortexM4 internally, providing developers with high-capacity configurable chip available memory (SRAM). It also supports external PSRAM and a set of expansion interfaces (I2S/UART/PWM/I2C/SDMMC/USB2.0/SDIO, etc.), which can be directly connected to sensors, off-chip Codecs, etc.

At the same time, it integrates MPU/FPU and implements hardware acceleration engines such as RSA/AES/TRNG, which can meet the design requirements of various advanced security functions of IoT products to the greatest extent. The chip fully supports the Ruilian "platform" architecture and can be programmed and developed in environments such as Mbed and FreeRTOS, including a complete set of communication protocols and mainstream cloud protocols, thereby greatly reducing the difficulty of chip development and application.

Source | Zhidongxi, International Electronic Business, Sina Technology

Exclusively compiled by Xinshiye

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