Artificial intelligence technology is constantly penetrating into all areas of our work, learning and life, and has also changed many business models, giving birth to the integration of new technologies and traditional industries. Especially in the fields of enterprise services, consumer hardware, culture and media, medical and health, and the Internet, intelligent voice technology is becoming a key factor to promote business model innovation and drive the growth of brand users. At present, including voice assistants, voice transcription, intelligent customer service, etc., many subdivisions in the intelligent voice technology sector have accelerated the application landing, and the hot intelligent voice industry has fully entered the stage of large-scale commercial use!
Intelligent voice application scenarios continue to expand, and the level of functionality continues to improve
As the core technology of the era of artificial intelligence, intelligent voice technology mainly realizes human-computer voice interaction through front-end processing of sound signals, speech recognition, natural language processing, speech synthesis and other technologies, so as to make communication between people and machines more convenient and faster. In terms of functional applications, early intelligent voice is mainly reflected in voice dictation. In the past decade, with the rapid development of speech technology and natural language understanding technology, intelligent voice application scenarios have begun to expand. From the downstream application market, there are mainly consumer markets and enterprise-level markets. Among them, the consumer market is closely related to our personal daily life, involving smart life, smart home, smart office, intelligent driving and other rigid scenarios, and the products are related to many consumer-grade intelligent electronics. Professional-level applications mainly serve professional fields such as smart healthcare, smart education, smart telecommunications, smart finance, and Internet e-commerce. From the perspective of the proportion of consumption, the most concentrated sectors in the intelligent voice industry are medical, automotive, consumer and financial.
From the perspective of technical characteristics, the accuracy, speed and intelligence level of voice intelligence technology are improving year by year. In terms of matching with the actual application environment, related technology products can already meet the needs of more high-end tasks such as "mixed language", "complex environment" and "multi-person interaction". Especially with the continuous integration of intelligent voice technology and other AI artificial intelligence technologies, the scene boundary and content value have been further expanded, and its market application scope has continued to expand.
Since the 50s of last century, intelligent voice technology has gone through four stages from birth to development, namely the embryonic stage of technology (50s to 70s of last century), the stage of technological breakthrough (80s of last century), the stage of industrialization (90s of last century to the beginning of this century), and the rapid application stage (2010 to the present). As a rising star in the industry, the mainland has led the world in industrial development in recent years. For example, in 2018, iFLYTEK proposed a new speech recognition framework deep full sequence convolutional neural network (DFCNN), which injected new impetus into the development of the global industry.
In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things, the demand for intelligent voice from intelligent terminals in many fields is increasing, supported by the two-way support of policies and markets, the development of the mainland intelligent voice technology industry has also accelerated, market participants have shown a diversified trend, a large number of technology-based enterprises, artificial intelligence enterprises, Internet leading enterprises have made efforts in the subdivision track, voice applications have begun to penetrate into more scenarios, giving birth to a large number of new consumption, new applications, new markets.
The intelligent voice technology industry has become the basic supporting industry in the digital era
Authoritative data shows that 2017-2022 is the golden development cycle of the global intelligent voice industry, with the market size increasing from US$11.03 billion to US$35.12 billion, and the high annual growth rate of 33.1% also makes more enterprises full of confidence in the industry. It is expected that by 2030, its market size will soar to $60 billion, with an average annual growth rate of more than 15%. In the future, the market share of the intelligent voice technology industry in the global artificial intelligence field will soon exceed 15%. Especially in the mainland, the intelligent voice technology industry has become the basic supporting industry in the digital era.
As we all know, with the decline of population growth rate, the dividend of the mainland's labor population has gradually disappeared in the past decade, and labor costs have continued to rise, which has become a core development problem faced by many industries and enterprises. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in mid-2020, the average salary of employed persons in urban units in the mainland leasing and business service industry was as high as 92,924 yuan, 1.35 times that of ten years ago. As intelligence becomes the main theme of the times, the in-depth application of artificial intelligence voice technology and products can fundamentally alleviate the problem of insufficient labor and high costs, and also help many enterprises reduce costs and improve efficiency.
From the perspective of industrial development, especially after the impact of the epidemic in recent years, many industries such as smart home, smart driving, smart office, and smart shopping are increasingly dependent on intelligent voice technology. In the long run, intelligent voice is an important entrance to artificial intelligence and one of the three core basic technologies of artificial intelligence, and its future development is limitless.
According to the "White Paper on the Development of China's Intelligent Voice Industry" released by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, with the continuous extension of the large-scale application of intelligent voice technology, intelligent applications in various industries have ushered in a demand inflection point, and more and more products have continued to emerge and have been recognized by the market, which has also allowed the entire industry to enter a period of explosive demand.
Local intelligent voice companies are on the rise
From the perspective of the global market, the market concentration of the intelligent voice industry is high, and some multinational giant enterprises in developed countries in Europe and the United States have laid out related industrial chains from different dimensions to form a complete industrial system. The leading enterprises in the mainland local industry have risen strongly in recent years, and they have the strength to compete with international giants in multiple subdivisions of intelligent voice.
As a world-renowned AI training data service provider, Haitian AAC (688787) is also the first listed company in the AI data industry in mainland China. In the fields of intelligent speech, computer vision, natural language understanding and other fields for many years, the company has established in-depth cooperative relations with a number of technology giants, scientific research institutions and AI emerging enterprises. In 2023, the corporate brand strategy has been comprehensively upgraded, further extending the industrial chain, relying on high-quality massive intelligent voice data and a powerful algorithm R&D team, it is comprehensively promoting the global commercial landing of AI frontier projects.
As a well-known intelligent video solution provider, Alto Electronics (002587) has been widely used in the industry for its intelligent video one-stop solution. In the global market competition, including FIFA World Cup, UEFA European Cup and other international top events, as well as more than 70% of the world's large international airports and more than 70,000 bank branches across the country are Alto Electronics' cooperation objects. At present, its self-developed and produced intelligent service robots integrate cutting-edge technologies such as speech semantic recognition, and the human-computer interaction capability has reached the industry's first-class level.
Gongda Electroacoustic (002655) is the world's leading provider of intelligent acoustic components, acoustic components and acoustic overall solutions. Based on the acoustic field, around the layout of the chip industry such as acoustic sensors, the company's products are continuously promoted in the fields of smart cars, smart homes, smart wear, and smart phones. Since the beginning of this year, the company has continued to increase investment in automotive voice products, MEMS acoustic sensors and high-end micro speakers, and has added production capacity of automotive electronic products such as automotive voice modules and RNC vibration sensors through fundraising projects.
Allwinner Technology (300458) is a designer of intelligent application processor SoCs, high-performance analog devices and wireless interconnect chips. Relying on strong self-research capabilities, enterprises have first-class system solution service capabilities in the fields of ultra-high-definition video coding and decoding, high-performance CPU/GPU/AI multi-core integration, and its products are widely used in industrial control, smart home appliances, smart hardware, tablet computers, automotive electronics, intelligent Internet of Things and other fields. At present, many of the company's product lines have been integrated into AI-related applications such as intelligent voice and intelligent vision.