How Does Microsoft "Ai Beauty Girl" Xiaobing "Fly Alone" Win The Chinese Intelligent Voice Market?

Xiaobing, which was officially born in 2014, is now "adult". But now, "adult" small ice finally ushered in his own real independence day.

On July 13, Microsoft announced that it would split the AI small ice business into an independent company. It is expected that the work related to the separation will be completed in the next few months. Microsoft said that it will maintain its investment rights and interests in the new company, and authorize the new company to use and continue to develop complete Xiaobing technology. "This is aimed at accelerating the pace of local innovation of Xiaobing product line and promoting the improvement of Xiaobing's business ecological environment."

The newly established independent company will have Shen Xiangyang as its chairman, Li Di as its chief executive officer and Chen Zhan as its general manager in Japan. Among them, Shen Xiangyang, former Microsoft global executive vice president and former president of Microsoft Asia Research Institute, announced his resignation half a year ago. Li Di is the current person in charge of Xiaobing.

A person close to Microsoft told the 21st century economic reporter that after the adjustment, Microsoft Xiaobing will be completely independent. "It's a good thing for Xiaobing. In the future, it will be more independent." At the same time, the person pointed out that Xiaobing's annual press conference will continue in August this year, and the split has little impact on the business development itself.

"The spin off may be conducive to Xiaobing's ecological construction in the Chinese market, strengthen the language ability of Chinese and dialects, and obtain more customers from traditional industries in China," Lu Yanxia, assistant research director of IDC in China, told the 21st century economic report, "in the medium and long term, (Xiaobing) may become a powerful market participant in the Chinese market."

On July 13, Microsoft announced that it would split the AI ice business into independent companies. -Photo by Gan Jun

Xiaobing is independent

In May 2014, Microsoft officially launched Xiaobing, an intelligent voice assistant. Since then, Xiaobing has been developing rapidly. By August 2019, Xiaobing has been upgraded to the seventh generation.

Now, Xiaobing has begun to separate from Microsoft and become independent. Microsoft said that the new company will continue to use Chinese Xiaobing and Japanese rinna brands after the separation work is completed. In the future, Xiaobing will further innovate in the dialogic AI engine, and will further cooperate with partners from all over the world to provide complete AI technology and solutions for a wide range of customers in Greater China, Japan and Indonesia.

What needs to be noted is that compared with the lonely and immature when she was just born, now Xiaobing has its own "circle of friends", which also constitutes its independent capital.

"Since its release, Xiaobing has led the technological innovation of artificial intelligence, and has made outstanding achievements in content production, intelligent retail, artificial intelligence hosting, intelligent assistant, etc., and has become one of the world's largest interdisciplinary artificial intelligence systems." Microsoft stressed that "Xiaobing brand enjoys high popularity, has a large number of fans and fans, cooperates with many partners and serves a wide range of commercial customers."

As a matter of fact, as of August last year, Xiaobing has made public 21 cooperative enterprises, covering 10 industries such as finance, retail and textile, including today's headlines, wechat, oppo, vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi, which are Xiaobing's "good partners". This year, Xiaobing has continued to cooperate with enterprises such as Tebu and wanshili silk to achieve a better user experience by using Xiaobing's artificial intelligence technology.

From the perspective of the scene, Xiaobing's full duplex voice interactive sense is also entering the car platform after connecting to the smart speaker and smart phone scene. At the just concluded World Conference on artificial intelligence, Chinese express and Microsoft have reached a strategic cooperation. Relying on Microsoft Xiaobing artificial intelligence technology, they will jointly land the world's first active artificial intelligence partner hiphigo on Gaohe automobile, and is committed to providing overall solutions from the pre installation stage of smart vehicles.

According to the latest data, in many countries around the world, Xiaobing's single brand has covered 660 million online users, 450 million third-party intelligent devices and 900 million content viewers, and its commercial customers have covered finance, retail, automobile, real estate, textile and other fields.

"Judging from the development of Xiaobing brand, it is basically mature and can operate independently," Pan Helin, executive director of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Central South University of Finance and law, told 21st century economics reporter, "after being separated into independent companies, the pace of localization and innovation in China and Japan will be faster and faster. Based on the R & D teams of the two countries and the local businesses of Xiaobing The ecological environment will also be improved. "

Market competition

In the years of Xiaobing's growth, Shen Xiangyang has never concealed his high hopes and expectations for Xiaobing. This may also explain why Shen Xiangyang became the chairman of Xiaobing after her independence.

In an exchange with the media, including the 21st century economic report, Shen Xiangyang explained the uniqueness of Xiaobing. In his opinion, the design idea of most voice assistants on the market is to do things. Xiaobing's design idea is to express "it's a little cold today" and "take an umbrella when going out" after users ask about the bad weather, which is more emotional.

In fact, to achieve emotional connection with users and have a more warm dialogue with users is the direction Xiaobing has been striving for. Compared with the sixth generation of Microsoft Xiaobing, the seventh generation of Xiaobing released last year has been upgraded in core technology and has a new core dialogue engine. In some cases, Xiaobing can lead the dialogue, from "interaction" in the past to "communication" now.

In Pan Helin's opinion, emotion is one of the value points of Xiaobing. "The main idea of Microsoft Xiaobing is to make AI have emotional intelligence. When other artificial intelligence is dedicated to completing complex work, Microsoft Xiaobing takes more consideration of the ability of" Empathy ". This is one of the keys for it to gain so many fans and to be the portal alone."

However, for Xiaobing, the current domestic intelligent voice market is still fierce competition. Among the domestic smart voice players, iFLYTEK, which has been deeply cultivated for many years, has been highly sought after in the past few years. However, many giants such as bat and Xiaomi have successively entered the voice market, and the industry presents a competitive pattern of competing for the best.

So, how to evaluate the competitiveness of Xiaobing after independence? "I think Xiaobing has found its own differentiation competition point and has strong market competitiveness." Pan Helin pointed out that, in addition to paying more attention to improving emotional intelligence, Xiaobing has also taken a path different from other platforms. For example, by participating in a series of entertainment activities, Xiaobing has become a star with subjective initiative. Even in the field of mass culture, audio books such as "sister Xiaobing telling stories" have received 4 million hours of listening, "This kind of development strategy based on culture effectively avoids the edge of other enterprises."

At the same time, considering that Xiaobing still has Microsoft gene after independence, and the future level of scientific and technological iteration is guaranteed, Xiaobing will also have a good international competition prospect. "Only by finding our own differences as soon as possible, attracting consumers, and establishing links with existing related industries to form an ecosystem, can we survive in the increasingly fierce market competition." Pan and Lin stressed.

Although Xiaobing has its own unique sense of existence, it is one of its commercial short boards without its own hardware. In recent years, companies including Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and other enterprises have focused on the layout of smart speakers. With the help of smart speakers, artificial intelligence such as Amazon Alexa, Alibaba tmall genie, Google assistant, baidu Xiaodu and Xiaoai schoolmate of Xiaomi have been commercialized early. In contrast, Xiaobing is more in the way of cooperation with hardware manufacturers.

Lu Xiaoxia's independence will not bring changes. "In the current Chinese voice market, mainstream manufacturers have their own dominant sites, and their customer relationship is relatively stable. Of course, it is undeniable that Microsoft Xiaobing's technology accumulation, brand awareness and influence may become a powerful market participant in the Chinese market in the medium and long term. "