From adults to primary and secondary school students, what can a dictionary pen fit?

21st Century Business Herald Wang Feng Beijing Report What can a dictionary pen hold? Probably a lot, and more and more.

In 2017, NetEase Youdao launched the first generation of dictionary pens, which put the Youdao Dictionary APP, which had hundreds of millions of users at that time, into an education hardware.

"The form of the dictionary pen was invented by the Japanese, but the Japanese are notoriously unable to write software and cannot do AI. So their dictionary pen looks delicate, but not easy to use. NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng said in December last year.

NetEase Youdao's dictionary pen uses image recognition technology and neural network translation technology, in particular, the AI algorithm used in it is 100 times the computing power of the previous generation, achieving a speed of looking up a word in 1 second, almost 5 times the efficiency of electronic dictionary word search.

Up to now, youdao dictionary pen has been upgraded to the third generation, including 650,000 to 1.5 million entries, and then to 3 million, and the language has increased from English to Japanese and Korean.

Recently, NetEase Youdao has released a dictionary pen for people to teach you, which is loaded into the English textbook content of the People's Education Publishing House. The intention of this move is obvious: NetEase Youdao hopes that the dictionary pen will be extended to K12 users and to the scenes in primary and secondary schools. After the "double subtraction", the discipline of off-campus training is strictly limited, but it gives the education hardware a huge market opportunity.

However, education hardware is a track that has developed for many years but is still very slow, the coverage of a single product and the market scale are limited, and the head company has almost not been able to successfully launch more than one hot product. Can the highly anticipated education hardware market explode?

<h4>Coverage from adults to primary and secondary school students</h4>

It has been 10 years since the dictionary pen was born, and in the past 10 years, the volume of this product has hardly changed, and the content has expanded dramatically.

In 2011, Hanwang launched the world's first scanned electronic dictionary Hanwang dictionary pen, using OCR technology and embedded translation system, encounter new words, gently sweep, translation immediately displayed, but also real pronunciation, query a word in less than 2 seconds. The price is 1380 yuan.

Nowadays, the mainstream dictionary pen has adopted AI technology, chip upgrades, the display is larger, but the volume has not changed, the price has declined, and the price of mainstream products is about 699 yuan.

"There are now 50 dictionary pen brands on the market, if there are no 100." Wu Yinghui, senior vice president of NetEase Youdao, said.

Wu Yinghui told 21st Century Business Herald, "When youdao dictionary pen was first introduced, the proportion of adult users was relatively high. "After all, adults are more keen to buy the latest digital products. As an upgraded product of electronic dictionaries, dictionary pens are also more suitable for the needs of college students and workplace people.

Any domestic education product needs to be extended from adults to K12 users in order to have a larger market and imagination space. NetEase Youdao itself is so, the online education company initially provided adult vocational education products, and then its Youdao boutique course launched a primary and secondary school live online course, the scale of revenue exploded rapidly, and has surpassed the adult business.

The dictionary pen is also extending to K12 users, and the content is filled in. The first is the English content, which is loaded into the primary and secondary school textbooks, and the function of adding voice correction. Secondly, other disciplines, youdao dictionary pen into the ancient poetry, for which a large number of audio recordings.

"We recently loaded the dictionary pen into the English, language other than the subject content, such as oral arithmetic, primary school students after doing oral arithmetic problems, with the dictionary pen sweep, you can see whether to do the right or wrong, the use of this function is quite high." Wu Yinghui said.

"K12 student users will definitely have a lot of different needs, we will continue to pay attention, we also insist that the dictionary pen is a learning product for all ages." Wu Yinghui told 21st Century Business Herald.

<h4>Slowly evolving markets</h4>

After the "double reduction", youdao boutique courses that contribute to netease Youdao's main income have been significantly affected, and the importance of smart products has become more prominent.

According to the recently released netease youdao second quarter financial report in 2021, the company's net income reached 1.293 billion yuan, of which the net income of learning services based on online courses reached 921 million yuan, and the learning products based on smart hardware were the company's second largest business, with a net income of 206 million yuan, an increase of 138.8% year-on-year.

It can be found that the growth rate of Youdao dictionary pens is very fast, which is still achieved in the case of tight chip supply. Wu Yinghui introduced that the first half of this year is the most scarce period of chip supply, and youdao dictionary pens have even been out of stock due to "lack of cores".

At the second quarter of 2021 earnings report, NetEase Youdao said that intelligent learning devices provide huge opportunities for education technology companies. "With the growth of demand, it is true that more and more companies have entered this subdivision track, but for intelligent learning products, there are technical barriers in the whole process from research and development, production to sales, and NetEase Youdao has made long-term and large investments in this track and achieved good performance."

After the "double reduction", education hardware has become a track that is optimistic about the collective, but this industry has been slowly advancing since the advent of the Xiaobawang learning machine, even if the most mainstream product of the learning tablet, the annual sales volume is only a few million units.

The reason why it is also difficult for the industry to have too high expectations is that even giants such as iFLYTEK, ByteDance, and NetEase Youdao can only count one product that can be remembered by each one, such as iFLYTEK's learning machine, vigorously intelligent learning lights, and NetEase Youdao's dictionary pen.

"By launching a large number of products, can we do this thing about education hardware?" Our current strategy will still be to look at one scene at a time. Education hardware has developed for such a long time, it is still a small category. That is to say, its market size is not so large, and the product categories are actually not as many as imagined. Wu Yinghui told 21st Century Business Herald.

Based on this, NetEase Hasdao "tirelessly" enriches the category of dictionary pens. In addition to the newly launched Renjiao Youdao Dictionary Pen, the dictionary pen K3 was launched in the second quarter, and even a frozen version was launched in the sequence of K3 products.

Wu Yinghui introduced that the dictionary pen K3 focuses on primary and secondary school students, and strengthens the content of language disciplines, such as the appreciation of ancient poetry. The logic of launching a series of products is to optimize for different user groups.

Wu Yinghui also said that NetEase Youdao will launch intelligent learning lights. This new category of education hardware created by Dali Intelligence has been a hit in the industry.

But despite the hype, the market response is still unknown. According to a recent report by "Late Post", the annual sales target of vigorous intelligent learning lamps is 2 million units. At present, there seems to be little hope of achieving the target.

NetEase Youdao has also launched a Youdao intelligent learning terminal for primary and secondary schools, providing learning diagnosis through artificial intelligence technology, so as to realize the intelligent analysis of paper homework. At present, it has served nearly 200 schools, and can realize intelligent grouping, homework correction, and generate personalized reports based on learning points that students have not mastered, providing tailored tests.

This is similar to iFLYTEK's aptitude-based teaching solution, and the recently disclosed 2021 semi-annual report shows that the operating income of iFLYTEK education products and services has reached 1.731 billion yuan.

"Before we made dictionaries, how much market did people think an English learning tool could have? Maybe selling 1 million units a year is a big sales volume. So in the current state, it should be steady and steady, one product after another to do a good job. Launching a lot of hardware products at once and then connecting them into a matrix is unlikely. Wu Yinghui said.

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