Future hotel 2.0 landing, smart speaker ecological competition into the deep water area

From the PC Internet to the mobile Internet, to today's Internet of Things, there are more and more connected objects, and even the connection between objects and objects has become an important trend in the development of the new generation of the Internet. In the face of the trend, almost all Internet companies are thinking about what kind of business opportunities are in front of this "connection" tide, and Alibaba is no exception. Ma Yun proposed the concept of "smart networking" at the 2017 World Internet of Things Expo. He believes that the connection between objects is only the foundation. How to realize the intelligent connection between objects and objects is the future. This is both Ma Yun’s thinking and Ali’s strategy. The release of the Tmall Elf seems to be aimed at a higher-dimensional Wisdom network.

From the launch of Amazon's smart speaker product Echo in 2014, "Pandora Box" was opened, followed by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Google Home, Invoke (Microsoft and Harman Kardon), HomePod, let the industry see The international technology giant's ambition for the smart speaker market. In China, Alibaba-led technology companies have also launched their own smart speaker products, especially the launch of the "Tmall Elf" smart speaker, which has completely ignited the intelligent enthusiasm of the Chinese speaker market, and numerous companies are rushing to flock This area. Relative to the popularity of smart speaker concepts, some cool Internet analysts believe that the application scenarios are less, the user habits need to be cultivated, the upstream and downstream ecological services are broken, the enthusiasm of the advance overdraft practitioners, or the smart speaker market will form a “virtual fire” situation. . The maximization of the commercial value of smart speakers requires further exploration in the application of the scene.
Future Hotel 2.0, a new scene to stimulate the commercial value of smart speakers

As the leader of the Chinese smart speaker market, Alibaba has spared no effort to explore and promote the application of smart speaker applications. Not long ago, Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Lab and Flying Pig officially launched the full-scale scale of “Future Hotel 2.0”. The Tmall Elf and the Flying Pig began to enter the hotel room on a large scale, and the smart speakers ushered in a new scene. Application landing. It is reported that the West Xixuan Hotel in Hangzhou and the Westin Sanya Hotel have become the first smart hotels to access the Tmall Elf in the guest rooms. The guests of these hotels have been able to experience the coolness of “Black Technology” and enjoy the day. Cat Elf's exclusive butler-like room service.

With the voice recognition technology of Tmall Elf, after staying at the hotel, the tenants can control the facilities of the whole room by voice, such as curtains, lamps, TV, air conditioners and other equipment. Guests can lie in bed by voice command to achieve the curtain pull; TV channel conversion; air conditioning temperature; room lighting off; even, the tenant can also use the voice command to achieve telephone dialing, transfer and call Room service you need. It can be said that the presence of the Tmall Elf is equivalent to providing a “universal” exclusive housekeeper for each room in the hotel. It can not only tell you the time of breakfast, but also book your car in advance for your trip.

It is reported that rooms like this, this year's Tmall Elf will cover 100,000. This not only marks the flying pig "Future Hotel 2.0" as an industry upgrade solution, it began to spread out in a large area, but also marked the first time that the smart speaker that has been considered "virtual fire" ushered in a large-scale application based on the hotel scene. And with the comprehensive development of strategic cooperation between Alibaba, Flying Pig and Marriott Hotel Group, “Future Hotel 2.0” will become the mainstream hotel service solution in the industry. The intelligent transformation demonstration that Marriott has taken the lead will definitely drive more The hotel joined. This will enable the application of smart speakers in the new scene of the hotel to spread rapidly, and even lead to the outbreak of application development of various hotel scenes, bringing the revolution of hotel information system intelligence and infinitely inspiring the commercial value space of smart speakers.

Application landing acceleration, the smart speaker market has entered the ecological competition stage

At present, Tmall Elf has supported 15 brands including Philips, Midea and Haier. A total of 19 different categories of smart home products can meet the needs of intelligent home and hotel. With the continuous commercialization of the Tmall Elf in the hotel scene, the various applications based on the Tmall Elf intelligent voice technology will inevitably accelerate. “The smart speaker is just an entrance to the voice interaction, and the depth of the service and the width of the scene determine the value of the entrance.” The introduction of the Ali Artificial Intelligence Lab, Shion Snow, in order to make the “Tmall Elf” in the hotel scene more Smart, Alibaba spent nearly 6 months collecting the dialogue corpus of millions of hotel scenes, "feeding" to the "Tmall Elf" for natural language learning, and only users asked about the weather, there are nearly 700 types of expressions. .

In addition, with Ali biometric technology, combined with Tmall Elf, "Future Hotel 2.0" can realize the intelligentization of customers from order to check-in, in the store, and from the store, so that the tenants can truly experience the extraordinary features of technology. In this regard, Alibaba Vice President, Flying Pig President Kublai said that the Flying Pig "Future Hotel 2.0" has been launched for a year, and various functions have been put into use in a large number of hotels across the country, including credit housing, VR housing selection, smart occupancy. , full-course consumption, etc., Feizhu Future Hotel 2.0 as an industry solution with a full range of large-scale promotion capabilities. Thanks to the strategic cooperation between Alibaba Group and Marriott International Group, “Future Hotel 2.0” directly cut into the high-star hotel field, which will become the “killer” to improve the hotel management level and improve the occupancy experience, and serve the needs of consumption upgrade. .

It is not difficult to see that the competition in the smart speaker market has actually left the voice interaction technology itself, and the competition is the application of the scene behind the voice interaction technology and the service ecology of the entire upstream and downstream. Ali has almost opened up the entire ecology of the Tmall Elf, from Youku, Gaode map, Taobao ticket, shrimp music, Himalayan FM to Tmall supermarket, rookie wrap, Taobao, Ali Intelligent Alliance, Ali Entertainment, Tmall Boxes, flying pigs, box horse fresh and other business sectors and partners' data links have been opened. With the Tmall Wizard, users can easily implement online shopping orders, recharge, query express, control smart products and other services. The collaboration between the Tmall Elf and the Flying Pig into the hotel industry is actually an offline extension of Ali Eco, thanks to its strong ecological capabilities.

The entrance effect appears, and the smart speakers are the key pieces for the layout of the future smart network.

The competition between technology giants has always been an entry dispute. Someone has predicted that the decision of the technology industry in the next decade will be an inconspicuous smart home device. In the competition of the smart speaker market, is the battle between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Ali and other giants really a small speaker? No. Cut off the appearance of the Tmall Elf, and inside it is Alibaba's first generation of human-computer communication system - AliGenie. It was developed by the natural language understanding and processing technology accumulated by Ali's top team of scientists. The completely independent core technology did not let Ali go to the closed but chose to open. After all, compared to the smart speaker market, the giants are more concerned about the huge service ecosystem that is likely to grow at the top of the voice interaction.

Ma Yun once said in the speech at the 2017 World Internet of Things Expo, "The essence of the Internet of Things must first be a smart network. Without an intelligent Internet of Things, we think this is a vegetative person. He doesn't mean much." Alibaba Group Chief The technical officer Zhang Jianfeng (line epilepsy) also believes that the smart network is the future. All objects in the future will be intelligently interconnected. The difference between it and the Internet of Things is that the smart network is not a simple connection between objects and objects but between the two. Connection. In a sense, the Tmall Elf is actually a representative of the Wisdom Network. Through the empowerment of AliGenie, the connection between objects and objects becomes intelligent. “Future Hotel 2.0” is a typical scene of Zhichao. The Lynx Elves are the entrance. AliGenie plays the role of “brain”. It realizes “smart” transmission through the connection with other objects, and forms a tight ecological cooperation relationship. Effect. The Tmall Elf naturally became a key piece of Ali's future intellectual network.

In addition, since the Tmall Elf can cooperate with the Flying Pig, it can also be combined with the ecological partners such as Alipay, Box Horse Fresh and Ali University. This kind of thing is happening. The cooperation between Tmall Elf and Flying Pig has opened up a new application scenario for intelligent voice interaction, and it is expected to grow more interesting applications in this new application scenario. For example, Tmall supermarkets, rookies, KEEP, etc. have launched voice applications based on Tmall Elf. Users can complete recharge, purchase of goods, fitness voice prompts and other services with the help of the mobile phone. As a physical fulcrum, the Tmall Elf easily set off a new retail scene and became a key node for Ali to fill the natural gaps between online and offline.