Smart home appliances sing golden autumn

Through the image recognition, dynamic recognition to achieve on-demand cooling refrigerator, combined with voice control, gesture control, human body tracking air conditioning, to achieve voiceprint recognition, home control speakers - with artificial intelligence technology to home consumer electronics integration, smart home appliances The lineup has grown and the product penetration rate has increased steadily, which has become the biggest highlight of the appliance store this fall.

Refrigerator: for remote control and

On-demand cooling

Compared with ordinary refrigerators with fixed frequency, direct cooling and mechanical temperature control, smart refrigerators usually use frequency conversion, air cooling, and computer temperature control. The mobile phone is bound by the WiFi module to realize remote control and on-demand cooling.

A smart refrigerator using image recognition technology usually places a camera in a refrigerating room, captures an image at the moment of opening the door, and combines a deep learning algorithm to extract image feature points, determine food categories, and configure corresponding preservation strategies; Use the action of food to judge user habits, and carry out supporting services such as recipe recommendation and health management.

In view of the natural advantages of smart refrigerators in docking and integrating cold chain logistics, Jingdong, Haier and Samsung have opened up online shopping, logistics resources, food website resources and refrigerator systems by reminding them of replenishment and recommending recipes.

The 24-hour standby refrigerator can continuously generate interactive content. LG's world's first smart refrigerator with Windows 10 supports voice control, motion recognition and somatosensory recognition. The 21.5-inch translucent touch screen embedded in the cabinet door will become The transparent window displays the ingredients inside the refrigerator, which automatically opens the door when the user approaches. Both the refrigerator and the Samsung smart refrigerator are equipped with entertainment functions such as watching videos and listening to music and introducing streaming media resources to further increase the frequency of interaction with users.

The data of Jingdong users on the smart refrigerator shows that the user's purchase rate of smart refrigerators is above 96%, the activation rate of smart refrigerators is above 82.5%, and the user activity of screens is above 67.75%. Focus on shopping, broadcasting, music, temperature control, radio, intelligent temperature control, sterilization mode, intelligent central control screen, expired reminder, dual camera and other functions. The bad reviews focused on the interior of the refrigerator with stains, scratches on the fuselage, and debris in the refrigerator. Jingdong has urged the rectification of production lines and strengthened quality control management.

At present, the product penetration rate of smart refrigerators is significantly lower than that of smart TVs, smart air conditioners, WiFi smart-controlled washing machines and smart kitchen appliances. On the one hand, the high price of smart refrigerators limits the widespread use of products; on the other hand, the essence of refrigerators is preservation, and users are not keen on the “magic” of manufacturers to make refrigerators as kitchen interaction centers. Cultivating users' perceptions and usage habits still has a long way to go.

Air conditioning: introduced voice, gesture, somatosensory control

Air-conditioning, which is also committed to refrigeration, started early in the field of intelligence, and the smart interconnection and remote control technologies are relatively mature and tend to be diversified.

At this month's World IoT Expo, Haier presented the NB-IoT smart air conditioner, which provides an application model for smart home solutions based on narrowband IoT technology. The narrow-band Internet of Things can cover the WiFi blind spot such as the corners of the wall and the basement. The binding of the air conditioner to the mobile phone can be completed by scanning the code, which is simpler than the WiFi module.

In terms of interaction, smart air conditioners also introduce voice, gesture, and somatosensory control, but the smart technology that users expect the highest value is human body sensing and human body tracking, that is, by detecting body temperature, state, quantity, position, temperature and air volume.

Since the indoor temperature and humidity are related to lighting and ventilation, the intelligent linkage between air conditioners and curtains and windows also enters the functional design range of the manufacturer, but the safety and privacy protection issues need to be solved first. At present, manufacturers have used the suspension height advantage of air conditioners to provide monitoring and security functions for smart air conditioners.

Jingdong Alpha intelligent platform experts told China Electronics News that smart air conditioners will continue to upgrade in linkage scenarios and AI applications to achieve linkage with temperature and humidity sensors, scene switches, wearable devices, and car networking, according to user habits and families. The age and distribution of the population control the temperature, and it is recommended to adjust the temperature according to the regional meteorological data. Narrowband Internet of Things, deep learning, automatic temperature control, security functions or become the next batch of "air outlets" for smart air conditioners.

Speaker vs color TV:

The battle for the center of smart home

Among the smart home appliances equipped with biometric capabilities, speakers with voice advantages and color TVs with large screen advantages are emerging as the control center of smart homes.

Language is the simplest and most common way of communication for human beings. Intelligent voice has always dominated the intelligent interaction of family scenes. Speech recognition and voiceprint recognition can collect data only with a microphone, and the cost is relatively low, so the smart speaker has an absolute price/performance advantage. At present, Ali, Xiaomi, Jingdong are building a smart home ecology around smart speakers, Jingdong 叮咚 speakers and Jingdong Weilian, Midea home interconnection; Xiaomi smart speakers can connect and control millet appliances.

"Compared with the use of mobile phone App to control home appliances, using voice to directly interact with home appliances can make users feel the existence of artificial intelligence." Tmall Elf technician Peng Yuanda told the "China Electronics News" reporter.

According to him, the Tmall Elf can connect and control thousands of home products connected to Ali's smart home platform. Third-party partners can develop applications through the SDK provided by Ali Intelligent Platforms, and the latest services and applications will be integrated into the cloud for speaker users to open with voice.

Financial services agency Morgan Stanley pointed out that Amazon's smart speakers have exceeded 10 million in sales at the beginning of this year, while domestic smart speaker sales are still at the million level. On the one hand, language thresholds make it difficult for foreign speaker products to be activated by domestic consumers; on the other hand, Chinese consumers are more willing to pay for smart home products such as smart TVs and smart washing machines in the European and American markets, which prefer smart energy-saving products and smart security products.

According to Zhongyikang data, the sales volume of smart TVs in 2017 reached 14.45 billion yuan, and the penetration rate of retail sales is expected to reach 93%. It is a “small ride” in smart home appliances and has a good user base.

Zhang Subing, director of the Digital Television Standard Compliance Testing Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said in an exclusive interview with China Electronics News that if the purpose of user interaction is for home control, the device is required to be easy to wake up and easy to operate, and the smart speaker is a more suitable interaction center. If users use audio-visual entertainment as an interactive purpose, they need to integrate technologies such as image recognition, somatosensory recognition, and biometric recognition. They can interact with a variety of peripherals and present audiovisual effects. Smart TV will become the control center of smart homes.

Smart home appliances sing golden autumn

Zhang Subing believes that artificial intelligence TV will play the role of life assistant and life steward more and more, and cooperate with portable intelligent terminals and wearable devices carried by users in the cloud to realize diversified intelligent interaction.

Smart home appliances: networking and

Safety is the threshold that can't be passed

Regardless of the terminal used to control the smart home, networking and security are the thresholds that cannot be bypassed. At present, smart products of different brands lack a unified protocol standard, which brings difficulties for networking and distribution of the Internet of Things.

Jingdong Alpha platform experts told the China Electronics News that the compatibility and security of the home Internet of Things is a challenging topic. On the one hand, it is necessary to ensure protocol compatibility based on protocol fusion, protocol mutual recognition, cloud docking, master device enabling, and instruction set mapping. On the one hand, it is necessary to establish a unified security standard and an open and secure security policy.

In addition, the intelligent function of home appliances is too dependent on the cloud, and terminalization and localization intelligence are not yet popular. Uploading user data captured by microphones and cameras to the cloud intensifies the risk of energy consumption and privacy leakage. The security of basic protocols, standards, algorithms and services, the multi-protocol conversion between networks and the application of terminal intelligence are still the bottleneck of intelligent home upgrades, and also the challenges faced by terminal parties, operators and software providers.

Editor in charge: Chen Caixia