From the perspective of market scale, it is estimated that the output value of smart home equipment will reach 15.1 billion US dollars this year, of which the US market has a market share of 47% in other regions. By 2021, the market turnover of smart home equipment in Europe will surpass that of the United States, with a market share of 40%.
After establishing a joint venture with Marriott in August this year, Alibaba’s smart speaker "Tmall Elf X1" will be installed in 100,000 hotel rooms to provide better service for passengers. As a result, Hangzhou Artificial Intelligence Hotel was officially launched, and this may be just a small "appetizer" in Ali’s smart home layout.
Fliggy, Ali’s online travel business, plans to provide voice-activated services, such as turning on the lights by voice, changing TV channels by voice, booking taxis and booking rooms.
Du Haitao, product director of Alibaba’s AI labs, said that the first reason for choosing the hotel market as a large-scale commercialization position of smart speakers is that hotel guests may have more and more demand for such services. "Hotel guests, especially vacationers, spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. If the hotel can directly execute commands through voice and provide them with corresponding services in the future, the satisfaction of guests will be higher. "
Recently, Ali AI labs announced that it will officially launch the full-featured scale landing of "Future Hotel 2.0" with Flying Pig. Tmall Elf will cooperate with Flying Pig to enter 100,000 hotel rooms, providing hotels with intelligent solutions from ordering to staying. Guests staying in the hotel can experience "face recognition" and enjoy voice control services.
Such a large-scale layout will soon push the smart speaker market in China to a comprehensive ecological competition stage. The hundreds of thousands of "Tmall Elves" cast by Alibaba will also carry out more in-depth "killing" with technology giants such as Amazon and Apple in smart homes.
Last December, Wynn Resorts became the hotel where Amazon Echo was installed. Analysts pointed out that the use of smart speakers has provided a good assistance for hotel services, reduced labor costs, improved the efficiency of hotel services and better understood consumers. In addition, it allows guests to enjoy a cool technological experience and give guests more private space. These advantages are crucial to the success of the hotel industry.
Compared with North America and Europe, China’s smart speaker market is still in its infancy, but Ali, JD.COM and Tencent have all developed their own products, and accelerated their development in this respect. Smart speaker products can bring users a better experience by better meeting the needs of the domestic market, such as providing voice services such as Mandarin and Cantonese.
Alibaba’s technicians have tested the voice service of Tmall Elf Hotel for millions of times, such as real poison temperature voice control, and 700 different ways of asking questions will be answered.
However, smart speaker services also involve some "thresholds", such as data privacy and security issues. In public spaces and semi-open spaces such as hotels and families, it will take longer to popularize the use of intelligent voice devices.
Original title How will smart home devices change the hotel industry in China?