On the eve of the AI explosion, the former overlord Dingdong smart speaker "swallowed"

In the spring of 2023, ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Wen Xin undoubtedly represent the hottest concept of artificial intelligence (hereinafter referred to as AI). Almost overnight, AI became popular again, and even faintly had the momentum of the "fourth industrial revolution", and even the stock prices of many AI concept stocks also rose sharply. However, just as AI became popular again, the first smart speaker startups have fallen before dawn.

On March 17, Dingtone smart speakers issued an announcement that its products will be officially discontinued on March 31, and the service of APP and intelligent voice and other functions will be stopped.

Dong smart speakers said that after March 31, users will no longer be able to use the "Dingtone Speaker" APP to activate the bound speaker, and all intelligent voice functions and background cloud resources, skills and other services will also stop maintenance, after this date, users will no longer be able to wake up Dingtone smart speakers and issue operation instructions in an online voice. For users who have recently purchased speakers, they provide compensation for depreciation residual value, and users who purchased through formal channels and the product is still under warranty can apply for compensation.

To say that this Dingtone smart speaker is not actually unknown, but it also has a prominent origin. In fact, Dingtone smart speaker is built by iFLYTEK, known as one of the "Four AI Tigers", and cooperated with e-commerce giant JD.com, of which iFLYTEK provides voice recognition, far-field recognition and interactive technology, and JD.com brings cross-platform and cross-device product link capabilities.

Since its birth, Dingtone smart speakers have been considered to have been standing at the "top of the wave" in the field of smart speakers, and even once occupied nearly 2/3 of the domestic smart speaker market.

At the fork in the road where smart speakers should choose intelligence or sound quality, Dingtone smart speakers actually made the right choice and bet on intelligence. Dingtone smart speakers add functions such as custom wake words, voiceprint recognition, third-party speaker expansion, and multiple pronunciators. However, as early as before the epidemic, Dingtone smart speakers have entered a state of survival.

At that time, some netizens revealed on social platforms that the music content library of Dingtone smart speakers gradually shrank, the accuracy of voice recognition declined, and even JD.com's customer service showed the phenomenon of prevarication.

In fact, in a sense, the joint manufacturing model in the field of consumer electronics is not established in the domestic market, and cooperation such as one side out of technology and one side out of the platform has almost never had successful cases. Beijing Linglong Technology behind Dingtone smart speakers was established at the end of 2014, and before the domestic market smart speaker "Royal Sanjia", that is, Ali, Xiaomi, and Baidu entered the game, Dingtone smart speakers were used as benchmarks for the existence of Amazon Echo. Their earliest product, the Dingtone A1, was released in August 2015, 2 years earlier than the Tmall Genie and Xiaoai speakers that debuted in 2017, and 3 years earlier than the Xiaodu speakers that debuted in the spring of 2018.

However, as a leading predecessor in the domestic smart speaker market, Dingtone smart speakers not only failed to seize the first-mover advantage, but were also overturned by latecomers, which obviously had problems.

And their problem, perhaps, is "infighting". In fact, this point has almost become an open secret in the smart speaker industry, as early as 2017, that is, Ali, Xiaomi, and even Tencent have entered the game, Dingdong smart speakers have really had a challenger for the first time. At that time, Ali's Tmall Genie and Xiaomi's Xiaoai smart speakers did not choose to compete in technology or product power, but cheered up a simple and crude price war.

In the face of Tmall Genie and Xiaoai smart speaker with a minimum of only 39 yuan, the Dingtone smart speaker, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than the two, is almost helpless. After all, for consumers at that time, smart speakers were still a new thing, and it was not strong enough to change the paradigm of life, so low prices also became the core driving force for consumers to try early.

According to normal circumstances, when competitors play the price war card, the brand with market leadership chooses "follow" is the most normal strategy, but on the contrary, Dingtone smart speakers chose "over" at that time.

For the indifference of Dingtone smart speakers at that time, some insiders said that it was whose account the subsidized money was calculated to, which became the focus of the contradiction between JD.com and iFLYTEK at that time. According to common sense, Jingdong out of the platform and out of the channel should be responsible for paying, but the problem is that after three years have passed, the market environment in which this project is located has been very different, and the strong rise of Pinduoduo has given Jingdong a certain pressure, and the status of Jingdong's intelligent department in the entire group has been continuously marginalized, and Dingdong smart speakers have been transferred all the way down from the sub-group level to the next level of the CTO system, and then it has become the front office secondary department under the CMO system.

Due to the "independence" in the tide of price subsidies for smart speakers, consumers also chose to vote with their feet, resulting in the market share of Dingtone smart speakers falling from 65% in 2016 to 2% in 2018 in only two years. As Dingtone smart speakers have become the "Ohters" of the market, iFLYTEK and JD.com also chose to "separate" in 2018. Subsequently, JD.com made its own smart speaker, and iFLYTEK continued to cultivate technology and launched the iFLYOS smart speaker solution.

In the final analysis, smart speakers, like smartphones, are a track with a double density of capital and technology, and the market competition is also unprecedentedly fierce. So since Dingtone smart speakers were "brain dead" as early as 2018, why didn't they announce "entering the soil" until 2023? The reason is actually very simple, because JD.com, which is responsible for maintaining Dingtone smart speakers, is no longer willing to continue to invest resources and does not want to fight another doomed war.

In the past few years, the smart speaker market has actually been going downhill. According to the "China Smart Speaker Retail Market Monthly Tracking" report, the sales volume of China's smart speaker market in 2022 will be 26.31 million units, down 28% year-on-year, and sales will be 7.53 billion yuan, down 25% year-on-year. The most obvious change is that with the maturity of AI, big data technology, and the spread of microprocessors and sensor hardware, major manufacturers no longer believe that smart speakers are the only entrance to the smart home ecology, so that the smart home ecological entrance diversion, and more emphasis on entertainment attributes of the screen smart speaker market penetration rate has been rising.

In fact, not only the market position of smart speakers is becoming more and more embarrassing, but the track of smart speakers itself has almost become a chicken rib. "Smart speakers are not only a traditional speaker bought back just to listen to music, but more importantly, it serves as an entrance to voice interaction and provides an interactive channel for background services. Therefore, under such product positioning, if there is not enough magnitude in the market, it will not cause scale effects, whether it is front-end user activity or the number of services accessed in the background", this is the former CEO of Linglong Technology Wei Qiang in an interview with the media, but also clearly pointed out the dilemma of Dingtone and other small factory smart speaker products.

Due to the lack of users, content suppliers and other smart device manufacturers are not willing to cooperate, and the lack of content and the ability to link with other smart home products will make smart speakers appear less "smart". Since 2019, the share of the three giants of Ali, Xiaomi and Baidu in the domestic smart speaker market has been maintained at more than 90%. When they have eaten up this market, not only the "godson" of Dingdong smart speakers, but also Jingdong's own son "Jingyu" has died down, and even their own little Jingyu AIoT ecology may not have new news for a long time.

At present, in the strategy of the entire JD.com Group, e-commerce and local life services are undoubtedly the top priorities, and it is obviously normal for Dingtone Intelligence, which is at the edge of the edge business of intelligent hardware, to be optimized.