The cold winter of cleaning has ushered in the entry of AI giants. Will it be spring or will they be stuck at a low level?

On the night of the 1024 Coder Carnival, iFlytek made a series of important announcements: Spark V3.0, which is comparable to ChatGPT, another Chinese humanoid robot , and the entry of AI into cleaning robots. This also means that the "iFlytek Super Brain 2030 Plan" launched by Chairman Liu Qingfeng at the annual meeting last year has taken the first step.

Relevant statistics show that the penetration rate of sweeping robots in China in 2022 is only 5.6%, far lower than 15% in the United States, 8% in Germany and Japan. Sweeping robots should have entered a blue ocean market, but things do not seem to be as expected. After the peak in 2020, the sales of domestic sweeping robots have been declining. In 2022, the sales of domestic sweeping robots were 4.41 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 24%, and sales have declined for two consecutive years.

Sweeping robots are also rare technology products whose prices are rising. According to statistics, from 2013 to 2019, the average price of sweeping robots was between 1,300 yuan and 1,500 yuan; in 2020, the average price rose to 1,830 yuan, and in 2021 it rose to 2,394 yuan, and in 2022 the average price continued to rise to 3,210 yuan. The average price has nearly doubled in just three years.

Sweeping robot companies have also had a bright performance in the A-share market. On February 21, 2020, Roborock Technology, which boarded the express train of Xiaomi's ecosystem, transformed itself into "Crazy Roborock" and was listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange with an issue price of 271.12 yuan per share. In June 2021, the stock price soared to more than 1,494 yuan per share, with a market value of more than 100 billion yuan, second only to Kweichow Moutai in the A-share market, and was named "Sweeping Moutai".

After the craze, the sweeping robot has passed its heyday. In April 2022, Stone Technology disclosed its annual report, in which its non-net profit was 1.19 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1.47%; in August 2023, Stone Technology disclosed information about the reduction of holdings by three shareholders, including Shunwei, Xiaomi, and Dingdi, totaling about 1.7 billion yuan. As of today's close, Stone Technology's stock price was 291.77 yuan, 20 yuan higher than the initial issue price.

Will iFlytek's entry into the smart home cleaning market with AI at this time become a 49-year entry into the national army, or will it seize the opportunity of the second spring in the cleaning field?

Why the sweeping robot is "unpopular"

There was once a joke that said: "Laziness is the ladder that promotes human technological progress." When you leave your busy work and return home, there is a robot that can free you from housework. Why wouldn't it become a must-have item in every family?

It was once a hot product, but people later discovered that the sweeping and mopping robot could not completely solve their cleaning problems. It just reduced the frequency of our manual cleaning.

There are several main reasons for this problem: there are blind spots in robot cleaning, the robot's cleaning power is insufficient, and it cannot be operated in a fool-proof manner.

The robots on the market usually have a round body and a laser radar on the top to help the robot identify the environment and avoid obstacles. This structure is very likely to make it impossible to enter under some tables, and it is also difficult to achieve a perfect angle when encountering right-angle areas, which makes some consumers think that this is a useless product.

Although sweeping robot manufacturers have been working hard to overcome the cleaning problem over the years, the robot's cleaning ability is still limited when faced with some stubborn stains. A cleaning product that ends up lacking cleaning power and requiring people to do it themselves will discourage some people from consuming it.

There have been great improvements in operation in recent years. The sweeping robots currently on the market are no longer difficult to operate. Only some elderly people are not as quick to get started as young people. However, the first consumer groups who encountered inconvenient operations may have given up this option of sweeping robots early on.

Due to various reasons, sweeping and mopping robots have reached a bottleneck period. Users who have been interested have already purchased them early, users who are interested will not buy them again, and potential users who are waiting and watching are undecided, causing the craze for sweeping robots to gradually fade.

Too late? Or is it the beginning of a second spring?

What was iFLYTEK thinking when it chose to enter the cleaning field at this time?

Don’t forget the other two types of people mentioned above: those who are willing to buy new products and those who are undecided. If you can capture their hearts, you will usher in a bigger market and even sweep away users who have already purchased the products. They will choose to exchange for new products because the new products are extremely competitive.

As a latecomer, iFlytek has made sufficient preparations for sweeping and mopping robots, and its most powerful weapon is its proud AI model. This also confirms the first step of the "Super Brain Project": to prepare an extremely smart brain for robots.

So how smart is iFlytek? According to the cross-comparison report of the National Economic Research Institute of the Development Center of the State Council, the comprehensive capabilities of the Spark Big Model V3.0 have surpassed ChatGPT, achieving domestic leadership and world-class status. The evaluation of the MIT Technology Review also believes that the Spark Big Model is the "smartest" Chinese big model. At the same time, iFlytek and Huawei have created the "Feixing No. 1" platform, an autonomous and controllable big model computing power base based on the Ascend ecosystem. The iFlytek Spark Big Model will start larger-scale training against GPT-4 in the next stage.

In fact, foreign robot companies have also been using large models to train robots, including the old American robot company Boston Dynamics. Their four-legged robot dog Spot has been provided to a number of customers such as the New York Police Department and BP Oil. According to Boston Dynamics, there are currently more than 1,000 Spot robots in use in more than 35 countries and regions around the world.

Boston Dynamics has been working hard to evolve Spot. Not long ago, they added a robotic arm to the robot . With the help of visual sensors , the robot dog can open and close doors autonomously, and its ability to perform tasks autonomously has been further improved.

Large models must be an important means of evolution for robots. Recently, Boston Dynamics once again showed the new progress of spot on its official website. By combining ChatGPT, Spot and other AI models, a talking robot dog was developed. The robot dog can talk to humans based on text and voice prompts, and also provides a visual question-and-answer function that can analyze the images captured by the camera and automatically generate image descriptions.

In this light, iFLYTEK's entry into the market with its powerful AI model may be the best opportunity for it to catch up with the competition, reignite the second wave of sweeping robots, and become a classic case of "robot + AI".