In the post epidemic era, as people spend more time at home, they pay more and more attention to the intelligence of home, and the smart home industry is booming. According to the data of China Business Industry Research Institute, from 2016 to 2021, the scale of China's smart home market continued to expand, from 260.85 billion yuan to 580.05 billion yuan.

Smart home is widely favored by consumers, but its actual use experience still has great room for improvement. "At present, smart home is mostly a single point of intelligence with smart single products as the core. Simple systems and early-stage scenes are mostly connected by 'point control points'."

Recently, Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei and CEO of terminal business, pointed out that at present, smart home lacks system level scene linkage. In his opinion, the essence of whole house intelligence is the revolution of spatial interaction, which is expected to become the way to break the situation of traditional smart home.

Systematization promotes the popularization of intelligent in the whole house

In April last year, the Ministry of housing and urban rural development, the Ministry of industry and information technology, the Ministry of public security and other 16 departments jointly issued the guiding opinions on accelerating the development of digital families and improving the quality of living. It is required that the relevant policies, systems and standards of digital families will be basically sound by the end of 2022, and a relatively complete digital family standard system will be established by the end of 2025. The development of digital home has become the general trend.

"Intelligence was a niche in the past, but since the second half of last year, more groups have begun to pay attention to intelligent products; from niche groups, geeks to ordinary users, more and more people have begun to accept intelligent products."

Chen Xiaoping, founder and CEO of yunmi technology, told the 21st Century Business Herald that smart home consumption is showing a trend of Pan crowd. With an increasingly wide audience, it is expected that the penetration rate of smart home in China will be greatly improved in the next one to two years.

At the same time, consumers' understanding and expectation of intellectualization are also improving, and their demand for smart home is more clear. "Users want their home to be a whole, not an island of devices."

Chen Xiaoping pointed out that although there is no shortage of intelligent products in the market at present, most of them are single products such as lamps, air conditioners and refrigerators. Various brands have their own set of intelligent interactive systems. It is difficult to connect and communicate between single products, and even make the use steps more cumbersome.

In recent years, it is difficult to realize the brand of home appliances, because it is difficult to realize the whole home appliances in the past. "In the past two years, more and more users will ask, how much does it cost to get a house for me?" Chen Xiaoping found that more and more consumers want to obtain one-stop and a complete set of smart home solutions.

In his view, the biggest change in the industry is from selling products to selling solutions. This year's whole house, intelligent solution.

Coincidentally, on March 16, Huawei also announced its latest whole house intelligent solution. Yu Chengdong said bluntly: "a long-term strategy for Huawei's terminal business in the next five to ten years is the whole scene Smart Life strategy."

According to its introduction, Huawei whole house intelligence is extending from the residential field to the whole space of medical treatment, education, office and hotel. At present, it has strategic cooperation with Shimao, Greenland, Jinmao, ocean and other real estate developers.

Bo Yuanxun, general manager of domestic marketing of Hisense refrigerator, believes that with the popularization of intelligence in the whole house, users are not crazy about intelligence in concept, but whether they can really solve the pain points in real life, bring more convenience to life and improve the quality of life.

A series of actions all show that the next battlefield of smart home will be "whole house intelligence". According to the latest data of IDC, the shipment volume of China's smart home equipment market in 2021 was 230 million units, a year-on-year increase of 14.6%; It is expected that the shipment volume of China's smart home equipment market will continue to grow at a compound growth rate of 21.4% in the next five years. The promotion of whole house smart solutions in the consumer market will become one of the important driving forces of market growth.

User experience still needs to be improved

This year, the field of smart home has made frequent moves. In January, orebo announced the completion of a new round of financing with a total amount of 1 billion, which is planned to be used for the innovation of smart home products and systems, the R & D investment of whole house intelligent operating system and aiot artificial intelligence technology, and the construction of smart home ecology and retail platform.

In February, Haier successively cooperated with incredibly home and red star Macalline to comprehensively accelerate the landing of scene brand three winged bird experience store.

The 21st Century Business Herald found that from the perspective of the current smart players in the whole house, there are not only Haier, Midea, Skyworth, yunmi, Sofia, europay and other home appliance enterprises, but also Xiaomi, Huawei and other enterprises committed to building a smart ecosystem. In addition, the Internet camp represented by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent chose the traffic + ecological route and focused on a few smart products such as smart speakers.

Although the prospect of whole house intelligence is promising, there are still many pain points and challenges. According to cshia data, in 2019, the number of smart home landing units in the whole house in China exceeded 200000-400000, and in 2020, the number of smart home landing units in the whole house reached about 300000-500000, accounting for only 1% of the newly developed buildings.

Facing the "new species" such as whole house intelligence, out of concern about the three pain points of use effect, data privacy and security and installation cost, consumers realize that there is still a certain time cycle for purchase.

According to Chen Xiaoping, at present, there are two major bottlenecks in the popularization of smart home, "the first is what is the use of product intelligence, and the product should eventually help users solve problems; the second is to have service ability, and what should users do if they don't use it at home?" He believes that technology is the core driving force for the development of smart home, and the technology investment of manufacturers will directly determine whether the products are useful and easy to use.

Taking voice interaction technology as an example, although it has been widely used, there are still some problems. For example, when users control through the smart speaker, they have to return to the vicinity of the speaker every time. For example, when waking up the device, sometimes there will be multiple devices at the same time, resulting in confusion.

Whole house intelligence means that we need to constantly break through and upgrade technology to realize home connection and scene interaction. It is reported that Huawei is introducing industrial communication connection technology PLC for the home Internet of things and applying the millimeter wave sensing technology of intelligent driving to smart home sensing. Yunmi continues to cultivate the whole house intelligent solutions from four aspects: senseless networking, space perception, active intelligence and natural interaction.

"Next, we will focus on 'zhihuijia' to continuously polish the existing products and do iterative upgrading and software experience Optimization on the existing more than 60 categories of whole house intelligent products." Now users buy smart home products accounting for 5% - 8%. Chen Xiaoping predicts that with the continuous progress of consumer education and industry technology, this proportion will reach 15% in the next one to two years.