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Chinese tech groups answer call for digital assistants

Real winners of the smart speaker wars in China will be those controlling big data

AN HOUR AGO by: Louise Lucas in Hong Kong
Voice-controlled digital assistants across the globe appear to have been given a single order: “Proliferate!” — and nowhere are they scrabbling as fast to follow the procreation path pioneered by Amazon’s Echo smart home speaker than in China.

Some 43m Chinese-made digital assistants were in place last year, according to the telecoms consultancy Ovum. Tech giant Alibaba is entering the fray; handset maker Xiaomi last month revealed a new smart speaker (at a bargain $45), not long after PC maker Lenovo launched its version of one.

“The world is going to be populated with [such] devices. People are going to make a lot of hardware,” said one player. “There’s going to be tech companies that serve hundreds of millions of consumers.”

Digital assistants are the latest ploy by tech companies to pull consumers into their ecosystems and keep them there longer — making calls, shopping, listening to music or navigation.

It is early days for the Chinese players, but most have begun with their own product offerings — so JD.com’s assistant can be used to shop on its ecommerce platform — and additional skills, such as weather forecasts, can be acquired.

China benefits from being virgin territory, says Radio Free Mobile analyst Richard Windsor. Foreign competition is almost non-existent, partly a result of protected markets and also a function of language capability, given China is home to hundreds of dialects.

Yet analysts are divided on how receptive China will prove to be to digital assistants. Mr Windsor says that Chinese predominantly access services through their mobiles: so while a digital assistant at home beats the PC and web browser more common in developed markets, it offers less of an advantage over the smartphone in your pocket.



Despite this, surveys show that usage is far higher in China than in the US or UK, says Ronan de Renesse, who leads the consumer tech practice at Ovum.

The winners, according to Chwee Chua, an analyst covering big data analytics and cognitive AI at consultancy IDC in Singapore, will be those who have been around longest and boast the most data. “To develop that capability, it’s all about the data. The more you have, the better you can train.”

In China, the data sent back from listening smart devices can be especially useful. Those in the English-speaking world are largely mono or bilingual. In China, where there are well over a hundred different languages and dialects — along with cultural references, sports heroes and culinary specialities and a host of other cultural foibles — platforms have more to learn.

This factor, analysts reckon, could play to the strengths of Tencent, the social media giant, and its Xiaowei voice assistant. Not only does it own the wildly popular WeChat messaging app, with more than 900m users, but Chinese often dictate rather than write their texts — partly because characters are time-consuming to write.

Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner, adds that the real value for Chinese customers — who are comfortable doing searches and similar tasks on their phones — is third-party offerings: ordering meals, booking flights and calling taxis. “But that would take quite some time . . . because it takes a lot of training and data to get the machine up to speed and to understand customers,” she says.

Stalwart smart speakers of the industry include Baidu’s Xiaoyu Zaijia, which had a screen predating Amazon’s Echo Show, and JD.com’s DingDong speaker, launched two and a half years ago by the ecommerce group and commanding an 80 per cent market share, according to Canalysis.

Like Xiaomi, whose speaker links up to its smart home appliances, DingDong talks to 100 brands that have smart devices, so can take orders to switch on lights or cook two cups of rice.

What is clear, however, is that profitability will be in shorter supply than devices. “In most cases, there is no revenue generation directly from digital assistants,” says Mr de Renesse. “It’s just a new user interface . . . and will only facilitate online purchases of goods, services and content.”

Worse, he argues, the smart speakers could wipe out existing sources of revenue by diverting users away from ad-bearing screens. “If tomorrow everyone did searches by voice, what would that mean for the digital [ad] display market?” he asks.

“You could look at it in two ways. Digital assistants could be cannibalising or negating revenues.”

As such, he views the plethora of devices as a means of protecting business lines and keeping consumers within the company’s ecosystem, much as Apple hardware encourages use of iTunes and other services.

Analysts also note that as a regionalised business — unlike, say, smartphones — China’s voice-controlled digital assistants are difficult to scale. “The only one that is truly global today is [Apple’s] Siri,” says Mr de Renesse.

This means many speakers will fall silent among the Chinese ranks of wannabes. “You will see massive consolidation because you need size to keep developing the technology,” says Mr Chua.