In keeping with a latest report by Canalys, South Korea’s good speaker development charge is second solely to China with Canalys predicting 132% development throughout 2019. It’s now properly publicised that China’s personal good speaker producers are driving China’s 166% market development. So, what’s the catalyst for South Korea’s development? It might properly be home-grown innovation.
SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest wi-fi operator, launched NUGU in 2016 — the primary AI-virtual assistant for the Korean language (so, two years after the U.S. Amazon Alexa launch).
The operator launched its first NUGU Wi-Fi good speaker in September 2016 and bought a reported 150,000 items throughout its first yr. Since then, SK Telecom has launched quite a few new gadgets together with a conveyable out of doors model of the machine in 2017 (the NOGU Mini), a retail retailer answer, the in-car digital assistant (T Map X NUGU) and, this yr, the brand new NUGU Nemo AI speaker, which features a 7-inch color show.
One yr after the primary NUGU was bought, the nation’s largest telco, KT, launched GiGA Genie. Positioned because the world’s first AI TV set-top field service, GIGA Genie permits customers to make use of voice instructions to decide on programmes music, voice calls, dwelling cameras and visitors data.
Korean Web teams KaKao Corp and Naver additionally launched their first good audio system in 2017. Naver unveiled its WAVE good speaker throughout 2017 based mostly on its Clova AI platform. Shortly after LG introduced that — though it had its personal SmartThinQ Hub — it was additionally going to fabricate Clova good audio system. This yr, Naver will make the “Clova Auto” app accessible, which is linked to Toyota’s Good Gadget Hyperlink (SDL). Naver unveiled its Clova AI platform to a worldwide viewers for the primary time in January’s CES in Las Vegas.
Two years after NUGU’s launch, Google Dwelling was launched to South Korea, in sync with the roll-out of Google’s digital assistant providers within the Korean language. Nevertheless, while Google Dwelling, Apple’s Siri and Samsung’s Bixby now all help the Korean language, Amazon’s Alexa nonetheless lags, with no help for Korean.
South Korea’s put in base of good audio system reached 1 million in 2017, three million in 2018 and is anticipated to prime eight million items by the top of 2019. A the top of final yr roughly one in seven houses had a wise speaker and so, family penetration is ready to greater than double this yr.
As a consequence of their early funding within the AI voice assistant market, many of the software growth for digital assistants is being pushed by the Korean digital and telecom sectors. SK Telecom’s newest NUGU voice service is a cooking assistant that may advise on step-by-step preparation of some 2,200 recipes. The service was developed in partnership with a South Korean cooking journal.
South Korean companies have actually grabbed the rising AI voice assistant alternative with each arms. They’ve developed subtle AI platforms, proceed so as to add OEM agreements with electronics and automobile producers, plus partnerships with international expertise firms. Korea additionally appears to have assembled all of the components for quick rising market for AI voice providers and content material at dwelling. As a consequence of continued innovation throughout totally different Korean AI assistant platforms, the nation’s aggressive surroundings can be richer and extra numerous than the two-horse race within the US.
China’s good speaker producers are at the moment having fun with stellar development and now appear to have already taken the lion’s share of the worldwide market. Nevertheless, it might be short-sighted to rule out the South Koreans. In any case, Samsung has led international cell phone gross sales undisputed for the previous eight years, so why not a worldwide Korean good speaker model?
A brief model of this text was initially revealed in Asia AI Information each day e mail publication on four July 2019.