At present, appliance manufacturers are at the crossroads of transformation. Consumption upgrading, artificial intelligence voice, big data, light extravagance… There are too many development subdivision nodes that need home appliance manufacturers. To this end, the layout of home appliance manufacturers is showing more and more intelligent trends.
The author sees that many manufacturers focus on the “chip” level. The chips mentioned here are not mobile phone chips, but sound modules for household appliances. But as far as the chip itself is concerned, it is obviously not something that can be quickly built up. Is it really for the future development layout, or is it filling the hunger by drawing cakes when the appliance manufacturers enter the sound module market?
Macroeconomic shocks, new policy of household electrical appliances usher in the countdown
Under the influence of macroeconomic downturn and rising costs the double sniping, the integration speed of China’s household appliance industry may speed up. On July 26, at a summit meeting of household appliances industry held in Guangzhou, in the face of many challenges, such as the withdrawal of energy-saving household appliances subsidy policy and the difficulty of financing of household appliances enterprises, the leaders from the household appliances industry have expressed that they will accelerate innovation in the future, continuously introduce high-tech content, high quality, and highly intelligent products through the layout of high-end industries, and seize the market opportunity.
“Zero subsidy” is coming, the integration speed of China’s household appliance industry may speed up
There is no doubt that intelligent upgrading of household appliances is an inevitable trend. In their view, the most direct way in the application of human-computer interaction is voice dialogue. recordable sound module will be the “touchstone” for them to break away from the mud and grow rapidly. To this end, many home appliance manufacturers are also trying hard to build the chip as their core business. And then, the domestic appliance manufacturers can meet the cruel competition in the market with a more relaxed posture. However, it is not so simple to realize the chip dream.
As Zhou Bin, president of KONKA Group, said, “Sound modules are not accomplished with one blink, they cannot be achieved quickly, but achieved after protracted battles.” Although Dong Ming Zhu dares to invest 50 billion yuan in the smart sound module business, it also proves from the side how considerable it is for the cost of research and development of the chip business. Just imagine why China’s mobile phone chip business has not made much progress until now. It is because the research and development of chips will encounter many difficulties, such as capital, technology accumulation, long-term information, the transformation of results landing and so on. Even if you find the right direction and goal, it will take time to improve. Taking Huawei for example, it spent more than ten years developing mobile chips.
According to Chen Yong, product director of CHANGHONG IC business, CHANGHONG and Acoustics Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly announced the successful development of China’s first composite intelligent sound module. This intelligent sound module has completely independent intellectual property rights.
To overcome the technical problem of voice enhancement, it is based on voice recognition chip and integrates multiple audio enhancement functions, which can achieve long distance voice acquisition. By breaking through the technical difficulties of voice enhancement, it can realize the functions like voice de-noising, echo cancellation, beam forming and identity recognition. It supports the recognition of non-specific people and non-specific words, and the recognition rate in the integrated environment reaches more than 90%.
And it breaks the monopoly of foreign technology and will strongly promote the development of China’s speech intelligent industry.
CHANGHONG speakers said that the sound module will be installed in CHANGHONG’s full-line intelligent terminals, including TV, air conditioning, kitchen and toilet, small household appliances, etc. It is expected that 50% of its smart TV will be equipped with voice control function in advance next year, and 100% of its smart air conditioning will be equipped with voice control function in advance.
A CHANGHONG official in Sichuan said that eight years ago, the company had already lay out smart TV. According to the company’s plan, first of all, it is to strengthen its terminal products, people-centered, and achieve an intelligent collaboration of people, equipment and services through extensive connections.
At the same time, on this basis, it carries out business model innovation, constructs “sensor” network, opens up data interface, and provides consumers with more and more intelligent terminals and services.
According to reporters, after eight years of research and development, the company has achieved many innovative results: such as the complex intelligent sound modules successful developed by the company, which breaks the monopoly of foreign technology, overcomes the difficulties of voice enhancement and speech recognition, successfully achieves long-distance voice acquisition, and supports non-specific sound modules, special sound modules.
Meanwhile, the company developed the world’s first super voice browser with simple operation and high recognition rate and took the lead in realizing the industry’s eight first and three important functions of voice control, minimalist interface and social sharing, which is in the world’s leading level.
In addition, Sichuan CHANGHONG still gains important breakthroughs in the aspects like operation system, voice, and video-on-demand system, multiple screen interactive technology and others. In response, analysts said that Sichuan CHANGHONG has not only made breakthroughs in key intelligent technologies such as chips, browser software and operating systems but also established a vertical industrial chain integration model from core components to the whole machine, injecting self-created “smart genes” into its terminal products. It does not only increase the company’s whole machine’s intelligent level, but also improve the company’s performance.
According to OVEY Consulting Data, a third-party Market Research company, in January and May this year, Sichuan CHANGHONG high-end smart TV market share in domestic smart TV products has exceeded 10%, ranking at the forefront. Sichuan CHANGHONG said that the company plans to sell 10 million rainbow TV sets in 2013, of which, smart TV shipments account for half of total shipments.
