At CES Asia 2018, the spotlight was also on smart speakers and smart-living appliances powered by IoT. Voice command looks set to become the next-generation user interface after smartphones. The Chinese tech heavyweights are creating their versions of Amazon Echo and applying them to smart-living systems, while home appliance companies are embedding those smart systems into their products.

Smart Speakers Under the Spotlight

Smart speakers were definitely another big hit at CES Asia 2018, with the Chinese tech heavyweights—Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com—showcasing their respective versions to rival Amazon Echo. JD.com: Ding Dong, created by JD.com,recognizes voice commands in Mandarin, allowing the user to make purchases or control various home appliances. Baidu: Baidu’s DuerOS responds to commands to play and recommend music or videos to users. Over 87 million smart devices are equipped with DuerOS, and the number of monthly active users of those smart devices has reached 21.4 million.

Source: Canalys/Coresight Research

Alibaba: Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s smart speaker, appeared on stage during one of the key note addresses. According to Miffy Chen, General Manager of Alibaba AI Labs,in less than a year, over 3 million units have been sold. Altogether, these Tmall Genies have received over 5 billion queries and performed 2 billion tasks to date. Alibaba’s smart speaker has collaborated with over 200 brands and over 800 different types of equipment in 42 categories and on 123 IoT platforms. Tmall Genieis compatible with 50 million home appliance products. According to global marketing, analytics and research firm Canalys, Tmall Genie is the top-selling smart speaker in China, with a market share of 59%, as of the first quarter of 2018. Tmall Genie executes 7 million commands per day.

Source: Canalys/Coresight Research

In addition to showcasing its advances in the smart speaker space, Alibaba announced its Tmall Genie AI Union initiative, which will enable its smart speaker to connect to a number of small home appliances. Tmall Genie AI Union is essentially a hardware upgrade to light bulbs, remote controls, fans and switches in small home appliances using Alibaba’s Bluetooth Mesh module that will allow instantaneous auto-pairing to its smart speaker at low cost and low-energy consumption.

Source: Coresight Research

Smart Living Appliances Powered by IoT

Haier: Chinese home appliance brand Haier demonstrated its smart-home solutions for the living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.In the kitchen, consumers can order groceries from the display panel on the refrigerator or get suggestions about what to cook based on the ingredients inside the refrigerator. The panel can also entertain: playing music or showing a soccer match while the user cooks.In the smart bedroom, the bed can monitor the user’s heart rate, while the smart bathroom can warm the toilet seat or turn on the fan when the room steams up.

Source: Coresight Research

Hisense: Leading Chinese TV brand Hisense introduced its smart TV with AI technology developed specifically for the World Cup. Hisense Chairman Houjian Zhou demonstrated the company’s World Cup AI Platform, which brings facial-recognition technology to the screen. Viewers at home watching World Cup matches on TV may not know much about soccer or recognize many of the athletes, but Hisense’s AI TV can help them become soccer experts: by leveraging AI and facial-recognition technology, the smart TV can display biographies, statistics and other related information on all the players.

Source: Sootoo

Key Takeaways

Smart speakers and smart-living appliances enabled by IoT solutions were clearly the big focus at this year’s CES Asia. A number of technology companies and home appliance manufacturers are flocking to bring smart devices into homes. Voice command looks set to become the next-generation user interface after smartphones. It is about bringing useful information to humans,at the right time and at the right place. The bottleneck to“smartliving” is actually the intelligence of the virtual assistant. With more home appliances becoming smart and able to capture data on human activities, AI assistants will have more data to learn more about humans. Alibaba is bringing its Bluetooth Mesh solution to integrate more home appliances with its smart speaker through its Tmall Genie AI Union initiative. We see this as an important step to improve the prowess of an already-smart smart speaker.