Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of the Smart Home

In the last century, the Internet was devised based on the need to transfer information between computers. In the early days, all mainframes were connected through the Internet, so the access to the Internet had a high threshold. With the emergence of commercial computers and personal computers, and the development of Internet communication protocols such as TCP/IP, more and more devices connected to the Internet. The more, the more convenient the access to the Internet, people can browse the information stored on the host computer on the other side of the world in a graphical interface. With the advent of mobile devices such as cell phones, technical standards originally designed for voice communications have evolved to convey broader digital information. At the same time, the number of devices connected to the Internet has also experienced an explosion, and the way of access is also more convenient - no longer need a cumbersome host and network cable connection, but can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Now, the world mobile phone market has seen signs of saturation, and we seem to be in the early stage of a new revolution - the Internet of Things, whose purpose is to connect all devices in a low-cost way to achieve control/communication and other purposes. In order to achieve the goal of interconnecting everything, based on the existing communication technology, the communication standards of the Internet of Things are also undergoing rapid changes. Standards such as narrowband Internet and Bluetooth Mesh are undergoing rapid iterative optimization according to needs. Compared with the previous era, the application scenarios of the Internet of Things are broader, which also leads to the complexity of its communication standards. In scenarios with high transmission rate requirements, such as video surveillance, etc., when the device is connected to the power supply, existing standards such as WiFi/4G/5G can be used; in scenarios with medium and low transmission rate requirements, such as wearable devices with built-in batteries, you can use Bluetooth, etc.; in scenarios with lower speed requirements, such as smart logistics and home equipment, due to cost constraints and scenario considerations, it is suitable to use batteries with smaller power. Existing standards include ZigBee, Bluetooth Mesh, Narrow Band Internet of Things (Narrow Band Internet) of Things, NB-IoT). The diversification of demand scenarios makes it unlikely that the Internet of Things communication standard will be dominated by one standard, and it will be a combination of multiple standards in the future. Currently, the first widespread application scenario of the Internet of Things is the smart home. In this scenario, there are two main routes. One is to use the mobile phone as the control center. The operation of the device and the firmware upgrade must be done through the mobile phone. This route appeared early and has low technical requirements, but the user operation is cumbersome. After the intelligent voice technology based on deep learning has gradually matured, a route based on smart speakers and centers has emerged. The smart speaker communicates with other IoT furniture devices with a low-speed and low-energy protocol, and directly accesses the Internet with a high-speed and high-energy protocol. In this way, the smart speaker has become the control core of the smart home, that is, the entrance to the smart home, its status, etc. The price is higher than the search engine of the previous Internet era. As the control entrance of smart home, ease of use is the first driving force for consumers to purchase and use. To be easy to use, smart speakers must not have shortcomings in the three technologies of speech recognition, semantic understanding and speech synthesis, and also have excellent performance in usage scenarios. At present, the algorithms with the best performance in the three aspects of the intelligent voice system rely on deep learning technology, and deep learning is data-driven, that is, 'there is as much intelligence as there is data', and large companies and platforms have natural data advantages . To intervene in this market, large companies must work hard on the device ecology and content ecology. Obviously, the process of this effort is a process of burning money, otherwise it will not be able to drive users to buy seemingly unnecessary smart home devices, nor will it be able to drive device manufacturers to use your interface for research and development. It can be said that the smart speaker is essentially a low-cost voice interaction device, which is the product of the balance between technology and business at this stage. However, its R&D cost is impossible to be low. At present, the devices on the market are all at a loss to cultivate the ecology, but whether the future ecology is like this is another matter (the limitations of Bluetooth Mesh itself) - anyway, everyone is burning on it. Money, as a big factory, it is almost meaningless if it does not burn.