Internal worries and external troubles, Dingdong smart audio has fallen, and the former hegemon is difficult to stop the market from shrinking

In the first few months of this 2023, the hottest term in the technology circle, it must be AI artificial intelligence, such as chatGPT, GPT-4, Wen Xin Yiyan, etc., all impact the cognition of the majority of science and technology enthusiasts, today's artificial intelligence, has long been not like in the past, we ridicule artificial intelligence disability. Today's AI is powerful enough to write its own code programs and write professional paper content, which has the potential to replace humans.

However, we do not plan to discuss how strong today's AI is, in fact, before the AI concept fire, intelligent products have long blossomed, such as the smart audio familiar to consumers, it can be said that many users first contact intelligent products, in fact, contact is smart audio products. Unfortunately, on the eve of this AI artificial intelligence is about to explode, a group of intelligent audio companies can no longer see the "dawn".

Dingtone announced the cessation of service, and the former overlord fell

Recently, the well-known smart audio brand Dingtone issued an announcement that its product Dingtone smart audio will officially stop service on March 31, when users will no longer be able to use the Dingtone audio APP to activate and bind the audio, and all voice functions and background cloud resources will also be stopped service can not be accessed, users can not use voice to control smart audio products, for users who have recently purchased audio, Dingtone official also provides certain compensation, users who are still under warranty can apply.

When I saw this announcement, the author was still quite emotional, if I turn back the time to a few years ago, Dingtone smart audio is a serious industry giant, it is an intelligent hardware product created by iFLYTEK and e-commerce giant JD.com, iFLYTEK provides interactive technologies such as language recognition and computing, and JD.com provides content and cross-device product chain capabilities. At its peak, Dingtone once occupied two-thirds of the domestic smart audio market.

The original Dingtone audio, due to its high degree of intelligence and strong ease of use, has been praised and sought after by the majority of users, and even added custom wake words, voiceprint recognition, third-party audio expansion and other functions, which is enough to see that Dingtone intelligent audio is backed by iFLYTEK, providing high technical advantages. But how brilliant it was at the beginning, how lonely it is now, in fact, as early as before the epidemic, Dingtone smart speaker has had problems such as shrinking music content library and declining speech recognition accuracy, so to speak, Dingtone smart speaker was "dead" in 2019, only to be "buried" in 2023.

As a former industry giant, Dingtone smart audio fell to such an end, of course, it is embarrassing, but why, let Dingtone smart audio come to this step? The answer is industry involvement.

Internal worries plus external troubles, the fall of Dingdong is not accidental

The company behind Dingtone Beijing Linglong Technology was actually established as early as 2014, the earliest Dingtone A1 audio was released as early as August 2015, the target was Amazon Echo, at that time, the domestic smart audio market was still a blue ocean, so Dingtone, which had a first-mover advantage, could be described as unlimited in those years. But later, after Ali, Tencent, and Xiaomi entered this market, Dingtone had a serious challenger.

The most terrible thing is that these Internet giants do not seem to plan to compete with Dingtone in product power and technology, directly and simply and rudely fought a price war, if the past attention to smart audio users should know that at that time 39 yuan Tmall Genie and 79 yuan Xiaoai audio, that is invincible existence, no price advantage Dingtone is not their opponent at all. Because for consumers, smart audio is obviously not a necessity of life, more users who buy smart speakers are just a playful mentality, which one is cheaper and more cost-effective, buy which one.

As for music enthusiasts, they will not buy smart speakers, not to mention those headphone enthusiasts, real audio enthusiasts casually buy a set of audio and front end, are hundreds of thousands, and really can't look at these dozens and hundreds of smart speakers.

The most terrible thing is that in the face of such a price war, Dingtone has the power of a battle against the two giants, but iFLYTEK and JD.com have not chosen to follow up, the reason is that the money used to fight the price war is not clear who is out of this problem, to put it bluntly, iFLYTEK is not an Internet giant, and does not have the ability to fight a price war with Ali Tencent, Jingdong has been burned by Pinduoduo in recent years, and naturally has no mind to manage Dingdong. The most excessive thing is that Jingdong also launched its own audio brand in the follow-up, that is, Jingyuzuo smart audio, which is also a disguised explanation, Jingdong and Dingdong have "separated".

And Dingdong himself fell helplessly under internal and external troubles.

In fact, not only Dingdong, in recent years, the entire market of smart audio, everyone's life is not good, according to relevant market data, the sales volume of the smart audio market in 2022 fell by 28% year-on-year, in the maturity and spread of AI, big data and microprocessors, the smart audio that used to be considered the only entrance to the smart home, is gradually marginalized, and many consumers do not think that they must put a smart speaker at home.

If the stock of smart audio does not reach a certain order of magnitude, then smart audio products will definitely not be able to cause scale effects, which is the dilemma that smart audio is facing today. Now we see smart audio in the market, only Ali, Baidu, Xiaomi and other giants are still doing, as for Dingdong audio and other small brands should fall is down, even Jingdong itself spent a lot of money to build the Jingyuzu brand, has long been no new news.

Perhaps a few years later, AI technology has been developed enough, consumers and manufacturers do not need the so-called big data interface of smart speakers, and the audio will naturally return to its original functional attributes, that is, playing music.