撰写
"You turned three digits into two digits."
"It means we are really working hard."
The above is the conversation between Cai Kangyong and Jing Kun that took place at the launch of Xiaodu’s new smart speaker.
On June 11, Jing Kun released a new Xiaodu product on Baidu – a product that can replace the previous Raven speaker in all aspects of performance, and announced the early adopter price – 89 yuan. Lower than Tmall Genie, lower than Xiaomi Xiaoai classmate.
1.
To cut to the chase, Jing Kun first reviewed the past few months, DuerOS’s cooperation with brands in various fields, including automobiles, speakers, home appliances, and so on.
In January 2017, Baidu announced to the outside world for the first time that the activation of DuerOS smart devices exceeded 50 million. After 5 months of development, as of the end of May this year, the activation of DuerOS devices exceeded 87 million, and more than 80 million devices were interacting with Baidu artificial intelligence every day.
In addition, as of January this year, the number of DuerOS MAU devices exceeded 10 million, and as of the end of May, the number of DuerOS monthly active devices has exceeded 21.40 million.
Jing Kun said that as of now, more than 20 million DuerOS smart devices have had various relationships with users. Users control smart devices through dialogue and obtain different information and services. At the same time, the DuerOS platform has also continued to expand. As of now, DuerOS has more than 200 partners, more than 100 master control devices, and more than 13,000 developers.
In terms of specific cooperation layout, smart TVs, including Skyworth’s mainstream models Q6 and Q7, are equipped with DuerOS. The TCLX/C/P series is equipped with DuerOS across the board, and Skyworth’s small TV smart speakers combine TVs, speakers, and set-top boxes to the market.
In terms of mobile phones, leading smartphones with DuerOS have been launched one after another, such as the Vivo X21 and Huawei P20.
In addition to mobile phones and TVs, children’s smart devices also have a strong demand for conversational artificial intelligence. Jing Kun listed some children’s smart devices equipped with DuerOS from January to May – including Fire Rabbit Story Machine, Biba Radish Head Story Machine, Mi Rabbit Card Learning Machine, Little Genius Watch, Reading Lang Watch, Xiaoxun Watch, etc.
Finally, there are smart speakers. At present, there are more than 6 smart speakers equipped with DuerOS conversation capabilities, including < unk > Xiao Biu, DOSS, GGMM, Jiusheng Xiaosheng, Lan Gang Xiaoqing, Kuke, etc. These speakers also have DuerOS conversation-style capabilities and acquire CPU through dialogue.
In the field of cooperation between automakers, there are now more than 5 cars equipped with DuerOS dialogue capabilities. Hyundai, Kia, FAW Pentium, BAIC New Energy, Dongfeng Fengshen’s new generation SUV.
In terms of the performance of Xiaodu smart video speakers, Jing Kun said that a new category was set after the new product was released on March 26. On April 10, the sales volume exceeded 10,000 units in one minute, and the first batch of spot products were sold out in 30 minutes.
2.
After that, Jing Kun focused on the release of this new product – small speakers.
The small degree smart speaker system has a built-in ARM cortex 4-core processor, which can be highly integrated to present faster automatic speech recognition speed and audio processing effects. In addition, the small degree smart speaker is equipped with a 360-degree ring sound field to realize all angles, high sensitivity full-range speakers, and a new acoustic wave reflection cone device.
In terms of hardware, the Xiaodu smart speaker is designed with a high-sensitivity ring microphone design, which is equipped with active noise reduction, beamforming, and near-far field sound recognition technology. It can easily wake up within 5 meters.
Functionally, Jing Kun focuses on the children’s mode and the geek mode.
In terms of technology, according to Sound Intelligence Technology, the microphone array of this small speaker is the world’s first 3-microphone ring microphone array, which can well balance the contradictions between ID, cost, sound quality design and product experience. The array configuration is flexible, breaking the limitations of sound cavity design and freeing up the infinite space of ID design.
At the same time, the 3-Mai ring microphone array has built-in call noise reduction, reverberation suppression, echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice enhancement, beamforming, gain control, automatic speech recognition and other far-field voice interaction technologies. In a noisy environment within 5 meters, you can still have far-field Keyword Spotting performance, accurate far-near-field automatic speech recognition, easy wake-up, and ensure far-field voice interaction experience. Moreover, compared with the 4-Mai, 6-Mai, and 8-Mai array solutions, the 3-Mai array solution is more affordable and has effective advantages compared to 2-Mai.
In addition, Sound Intelligence Technology also uses anti-strong noise wake-up technology (AKS technology), vertical anti-strong noise recognition technology (VAN technology), OpenAEC technology and other optimization methods to enhance the far-field voice interaction experience.
3.
Seeing the configuration and functions of Xiaodu smart speakers, I can’t help but think of the Raven speakers that Baidu executives have built heavily.
Speaking of the relationship between Lu Cheng, Raven and Baidu, it is actually more of a personal relationship between Lu Cheng and Lu Qi. According to Lei Feng.com,As early as 2015, when Lu Qi was still at Microsoft, he had several in-depth conversations with Lu Cheng. At that time, Lu Cheng’s views and opinions on the intelligent voice interaction industry were very attractive to Lu Qi.The latter has also been deeply researching dialogue interaction systems, including the product development and operation of Microsoft Xiaoice and Xiaona.
In April 2014, 36Kr and Microsoft Venture Capital Accelerator co-organized WISE Talk event, Lv Cheng with his Flow project debut, one minute demo after the demonstration, Zhen Fund Wang Qiang shouted "I vote for you", on the spot to raven technology 1 million dollars angel round investment; after that, Matrix China added 2 million dollars.
On January 17, Baidu officially announced that former Microsoft global executive vice president Lu Qi will serve as Baidu group president and chief operating officer (COO), mainly responsible for Baidu’s products, technology, sales and marketing operations.
On February 16, Baidu announced the acquisition of Raven Technology Co., Ltd., and the founder Lu Cheng officially joined Baidu with the team. After the acquisition of Raven Technology, the team will form Baidu’s smart home department. Lu Cheng will serve as the general manager of Baidu’s smart home hardware and report directly to Baidu Group President and chief operating officer Lu Qi.
After joining Lv Cheng, he will be mainly responsible for Baidu’s intelligent hardware business, and cooperate with Deepsecret to create products with the ultimate innovative experience, accelerate the external output progress of Deepsecret OS, and help Baidu build an artificial intelligence ecosystem.
After that, the entire Raven team went through a long period of low-key vocalization, and finally launched the Raven speaker at the Baidu World Conference in November. At that time, it was also Lu Cheng’s highlight moment at Baidu. Lu Qi spent a lot of prefixes to bring Lu Cheng and his products.
But in fact, according to informed sources to Lei Feng.com, since Lu Qi proposed his resignation at the beginning of this year, the entire Raven business unit was demoted within Baidu; after that, Lu Qi withdrew from the core management, and various senior Raven employees also left one after another.
The person familiar with the matter told Lei Feng.com that on the one hand, the design of the Raven itself and the style of weak technology are not very compatible with Baidu. On the other hand, Lu Chengwei pushed the Raven speaker and asked Baidu Group executives for too many resources, including the demand for investing heavily in the introduction of Baidu Music copyright, which was not affirmed or satisfied. After focusing on design and sound quality to create a "work in progress" Raven speaker, as well as less optimistic sales results, the senior management was not satisfied with the Raven team.
Later, Lu Qi also admitted that he had been too hasty in acquiring Raven Technology. The words implied that "he did not have a thorough understanding of Raven and Lu Cheng". A more obvious clue appeared on March 6 this year, Baidu announced the official establishment of the "Smart Living Group (SLG) ", with Baidu Group President and chief operating officer Lu Qi concurrently serving as the general manager. At the same time, the original Baidu Smart Hardware Division was changed to Raven Studio, which was in charge of Lu Cheng.
On May 18, Baidu announced that Jing Kun, the general manager of Du Mi’s business department, would serve as the general manager of the Smart Life Business Group (SLG), reporting directly to Robin Li in the coming period. The logic of gradually removing the Raven team from the Baidu system gradually emerged.
This time, Baidu launched the screenless smart speaker Xiaodu Speaker, which is obviously to replace the Raven H and obliquely reveal the fact that the Raven team has completely left the Baidu system.
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