The New Chinese Smart Speaker Startup Maybe
Exploring the prototype Lily
As of 5th of July 2019, at this time of writing, the company Maybe has received $1,525,889 in crowdfunding on IndieGoGo. Their initial funding target was $10,000 so they blasted past that and the campaign is not over yet. Their short pitch on the crowdfunding platform.
Learn Chinese the natural way. No books, no vocabulary lists, no flash cards. Just speak.
The Chinese Assistant seems a promising venture, but it faces some stark competition from large companies.
The US Smart Speaker ownership seems to be growing rapidly.
Recently however China overtook the US in Smart Speaker Market Share. It may seem the US is lagging behind China’s smart speaker shipments that grew by 500% in the first quarter of 2019 according to TechCrunch. It seems China has managed to achieve a 51% market share.
Additionally according to Canalys there were 207.9 million smart speakers sold in 2018, and it is expected to rise to over 500 million in 2023.
As such it can be said to be a possible market for the company Maybe and its smart speaker Lily.
The 1st smart speaker that teaches Chinese
The founder of Maybe CEO, Jie Meng-Gerard, started working on voice-controlled speakers in 2014 before the birth of Alexa and has since led the development of 3 voice-controlled speakers, including one with Baidu.
He was also the co-founder of voice-controlled speaker Whyd. He is a YCombinator alum and fun fact, was a rocket scientist working on algorithms for satellite launchers for the European Space Agency during his PhD in AI at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.
He now develops voice control systems and AI chipsets for smart speakers.
Maybe is an AI company that develops voice-controlled devices and voice processing AI chipsets which is based between San Francisco and Shenzhen. Maybe is backed by Tencent through the Tencent AI Accelerator (40 companies selected out of 1500) and has worked with Baidu on a voice-controlled speaker. Our founder also went through YCombinator. The team is composed of PhDs in Machine Learning and Signal Processing, software, engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers that have built products for Google, Samsung, Intel and Huawei.
They are a team of 16–17 people so going up against their large competitors may be a challenge. Yet other small startups have been able to succeed in tough markets before them, they seem focused on the educational technology that can run on Smart Speakers, so a software approach with a hardware product seems interesting. Their claim is lofty:
Maybe is making education cheaper and more accessible by developing automated teaching devices powered by Artificial Intelligence. Maybe’s first product is a voice-controlled speaker that can teach Chinese. Our goal is to foster a new era in which robots teach humans and humans have access to unlimited education.
So let us look closer at a few competing products.
Tmall Genie
The Tmall Genie is a smart speaker developed by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group, using the intelligent personal assistant service AliGenie. Introduced in July 2017, the device consists of a cylindrical body with omni-directional speakers and an LED light ring at the bottom of the device. As with other smart speakers, the Genie supports web searches, music streaming, control home automation devices, and order products from Tmall. Voice interaction with the device is currently only available in Mandarin.
AliGenie is capable of smart home control, music playback, voice shopping, taking notes and more. AliGenie also features voice recognition, voiceprint recognition, semantic understanding and speech synthesis. AliGenie is an open platform, allowing different manufactures to work on the system and add it to third party products.
Tmall is is a Chinese-language website for business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail, spun off from Taobao, operated in China by Alibaba Group. It is a platform for local Chinese and international businesses to sell brand name goods to consumers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Being the world’s second biggest e-commerce website after Taobao, it has over 500 million monthly active users, as of February 2018. It is the world’s seventh most visited website according to Alexa Internet Inc.
Alexa Internet Inc and Amazon Alexa
Alexa.com, a subsidiary of Amazon, provides brands, marketers, and agencies with a full suite of SEO and competitor analysis tools.
Information is power — if you have the right tools. Alexa’s suite of intuitive analytics products transforms data into meaningful insights that lead to competitive advantage for your company.
This is apparently important not to confuse with Amazon Alexa the virtual assistant developed by Amazon. Amazon.com Inc as most of you will know by know is an American multinational technology company focused on cloud computing, digital streaming, e-commerce and artificial intelligence.
Amazon Alexa was first used in the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Dot smart speakers developed by Amazon Lab126 (the lab that also developed Kindle). In January 2019, Amazon’s devices team announced that they had sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices.
Is it unfair to draw a line here? They are set to gather a lot of information.
Mining data from voice recordings
What type of data can be mined from voice recordings? I would like to explore what datasets that could be used to gain insight. This is not set in stone and is likely to develop.
“AI-first companies always think — that’s a dataset to be mined…”
-Frank Chen, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. Speaking at the New York Times Conference 20th of February 2018
I was unable to mention Google Home to the same extent however they are also a big player on this market. It will be interesting to track the developments in the voice market with smart speakers and the aggregators of data with potential spillover effects to other parts of the these large Internet companies’ business models.
Will Maybe be a success, maybe – maybe not. It remains to be seen.
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I am challenging myself to write and think about the topic of artificial intelligence for the next 500 days with the #500daysofAI. This is a challenge I invented to keep thinking of this topic and share my words with you.
