Alibaba's version of the digital personal assistant will be available on August 8th only in China and without a display:
Alibaba's "Tmall Genie X1" will go for 499 yuan ($73) to the first 1,000 people during a one-month trial, coming in below Apple's $349 HomePod and the roughly $180 Echo. Its biggest competitor, Tencent Holdings Ltd., is developing a voice-activated digital speaker that could hit the market within months, Tencent President Martin Lau said in a May interview. And on Wednesday, Baidu Inc. showed off its own "DuerOS" personal assistant.
Taking a page from Amazon.com Inc. and Google, Hangzhou-based Alibaba's speaker offers voice-controlled services from music streaming to newscasts and calendar-booking, according to its website. Importantly, the gadget -- powered by the AliGenie system -- may eventually simplify shopping for the Chinese e-commerce giant's 450 million active buyers who turn to the website for everything from cherries to makeup.
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
Related:
Amazon Rolls out Chatbot Tools in Race to Dominate Voice-Powered Tech
Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) chief technology officer is working toward a day when people can control almost any piece of software with their voice.
The company on Wednesday rolled out the technology powering Alexa, its voice assistant that competes with Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) Siri, to developers so they can build chat features into their own apps, CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview. The service, Amazon Lex, was in a preview phase since late 2016.
[...] Processing vast quantities of data is key to artificial intelligence, which lets voice assistants decode speech. Amazon will take the text and recordings people send to apps to train Lex - as well as Alexa - to understand more queries.
That could help Amazon catch up in data collection. As popular as Amazon's Alexa-powered devices are, such as Echo speakers, the company has sold an estimated 10 million or more. Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones and other devices with Siri.
[...] As with other cloud-based services, Amazon will charge developers based on how many text or voice requests Lex processes.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-rolls-chatbot-tools-race-181632556.html
Amazon is dominating the voice-controlled speaker market, according to a new forecast from eMarketer out this morning. The maker of the Echo-branded speakers will have 70.6 percent of all voice-enabled speaker users in the U.S. this year – well ahead of Google Home's 23.8 percent and other, smaller players like Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel, who combined only account for 5.6 percent of users.
The new report backs up another from VoiceLabs released in January, which also found that Amazon was leading the voice-first device market, thanks to Echo's popularity.
While the market itself is not expected to be a winner-take-all scenario, competitors like Amazon and Google will win entire homes, as most consumers have said they wouldn't consider buying a competing device once they already own one voice-controlled speaker.
Gee whiz!
China's leading internet search engine Baidu's stock price tumbled after its first quarter earnings year over year dropped 80% leading to its first quarterly loss since inception. Baidu posted a net loss of 327 million renminbi ($49 million), contrasted against 6.7 billion RMB profit a year earlier. Revenue increased 15% year over year.
Baidu stated that strong demand for ads in the education, retail, and business services markets failed to offset "less vibrant" demand from the healthcare, online gaming, and financial sectors. Baidu also stopped disclosing its growth in active online customers, and Hailong Xiang, the senior VP of its search unit, abruptly resigned.
Meanwhile, TAC (traffic acquisition costs) rose 41% annually and accounted for 13% of its total revenue and 18% of its marketing revenue. Those percentages were in line with previous quarters, and indicates that Baidu isn't spending too much money to lock in advertisers.
For comparison, Google and Sogou (one of several competitors in the Chinese market) spent 2-4x as much on TAC as a percentage of revenue.
Instead, Baidu is heavily investing in various Google-alike alternative technologies including smart speakers in
its virtual assistant DuerOS, its short video app Haokan, its autonomous driving platform Apollo, Mini Programs for the Baidu App, cloud services, and other ecosystem expansion efforts.
Baidu competes against Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in the Chinese market. Bytedance also suffered some from the slowdown in the past year. Alibaba and Tencent which also compete with Baidu in the online advertising and streaming video spaces, both posted significant gains.
The search giant has promoted Dou Shen, previously over its mobile products, to senior vice president to replace Xiang, and interestingly, has also rebranded its search business as its mobile business.
Whether these adjustments and investments will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.
Some previous Baidu related Articles
Baidu Entering The Driverless Car Race
Baidu's Web Browser Eliminates Privacy
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Computer Scientists are Astir After Baidu Team is Barred From A.I. Competition
Baidu overtakes Google in global smart speaker market
Chinese search giant Baidu is now the world's second biggest vendor of smart speakers, according to a new report from Canalys. The research firm says Baidu overtook Google to capture 17.3 percent of the global market with 4.5 million shipments in the second quarter of 2019, representing staggering year-on-year growth of 3,700 percent. Amazon remains the overall leader with more than 25 percent share of the market and 6.6 million shipments.
Baidu's AI speakers run on an AI platform called DuerOS. The company initially targeted the high end of the market with the Teenage Engineering-designed Raven H speaker, but that product apparently sold poorly. More recently, Baidu has pushed sales of much less expensive models, with the basic Xiaodu speaker selling for as low as 89 yuan (~$12). Baidu overtook previous domestic leader Alibaba in the first quarter of this year in China, according to Canalys.
But the company has faced some trouble lately:
Baidu has lost over $60 billion in value since its peak — now earnings are expected to fall further
TikTok's Parent Pushes Into Search Business in Threat to Baidu
Baidu is facing an unlikely challenger in China's search market — TikTok owner ByteDance
Baidu: 'China's Google' Is Not Done Yet
Related: Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu, "China's Google", Shows First Loss
Google Will Give 100,000 Home Minis to People With Paralysis
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday July 06 2017, @05:18PM (1 child)
Have you considered paying Chinese megacorps to spy on you constantly?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:43PM
At least you know what you're getting. With "US" corps, you're assuming some good-ol' Delaware guys are spying on you, but then it turns out that it's legally Irish companies, but with a Dutch piece, and then some Caimans get involved...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @05:59PM (1 child)
Are these "talk boxes" just a fad, or do people find real uses for them? If so, I'd like a substantive list of examples. We already have Siri and Siri clones. Why Yet Another Device to manage, break, or get hacked with?
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:30PM
Because Siri doesn't speak Mandarin or Cantonese?
And there are more Mandarin/Cantonese speakers who don't speak English than the entire population of US?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:10PM (2 children)
Amazon's Echo Dot [amazon.com] is about $50 last I looked. Sometimes less. For instance, as I write this, there's a "buy 3, get $20 off" thing going on.
Someone's not even trying to get this right.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:09PM (1 child)
Echo Dot ain't the Echo, is it now?
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Echo-Bluetooth-Speaker-with-WiFi-Alexa/dp/B00X4WHP5E [amazon.com]
Price: $179.99
The Alibaba system is compared to the $180 Echo because it is larger and has a better speaker than Echo Dot, clearly.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:39PM
Yes, it is. The only difference is the speaker size. In the context of the article, which is talking about voice enabled digital personal assistants, the Echo dot is exactly as relevant as the Echo itself - and a lot more popular, for the obvious reason. The article was doing price comparisons between systems, not names. The Echo Dot's more capable than the older Echo in several ways, too; for instance, you can wire it right to your stereo system if you like, and enjoy fidelity far beyond what the original Echo provides. It's also (a lot) smaller / more convenient, and fits in a lot more places, and consumes less power.
Yep, TFS is very misleading on price / system. And considering it makes such a prominent point of it... thumbs down.
(Score: 2) by J_Darnley on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:01PM
Maybe this time people will believe that this is an always on microphone except for the Chinese spies.