According to the data, compared with 2016, the proportion of the population aged 60 and over in 2017 was 17.3%, up 0.6%; meanwhile, the birth population decreased by 630000. Obviously, the need to "let machines help people do things" is growing. For industry insiders or investors, this is a potential trillion level market: there are as many old and weak patients as there are robots. So consumer service robots are born with the mission of "caring for people". However, despite the popularity of artificial intelligence and the emergence of service robots, it is an indisputable fact that products do not match human needs.
What is the dilemma of the development of China's consumer robot market?
• user confidence and experience are hurt by "speculators"
In 2017, the dilemma of consumer robots is not so much that the whole market has not been fully cultivated, but rather that users in the C-end market have inaccurate cognition of service robots, so that there is still a blind denial of existing robot products.
At the beginning of this year, a consumer survey conducted by hanvis group showed that almost a third of Chinese consumers are open to robots. This seems to indicate that 2018 will be the first year of full integration of machines and human beings. But in fact, many practitioners in the industry are worried.
"The consumer robot market needs to be nurtured, which is a process of guidance and gradual progress. But now the domestic C-end robot market can't be opened, the main reason is that many "speculators" have smashed the market, making the user experience willing to try is not good. " Chen Zong, CEO of a consumer robot company, said.
Product form division is fuzzy, technology and specification are not mature
With the development, the field of consumer robots has been gradually subdivided, but between the two application scenarios of caring for the elderly and children, the product forms of these two types of robots in the industry are still in the exploration stage, and there is no clear division.
Of course, not only the application layer is not fully developed, but also there are many problems in the development of technology.
Only looking at the hardware, the development of consumer robots can be seen. For example, on the market, although the service robot products have been launched for two or three years, so far, the mainstream products are still "barrel" robots. Here, the barrel design not only reduces the flexibility of the robot, but also reduces the fun of the user experience, which is one of the reasons why consumers do not pay.
In the aspect of software design, the existing service robots mostly use the way of upload cloud processing. At present, there is no clear technical specification to protect the privacy of users.
How to survive before the robot's tuyere arrives?
When will the real tuyere come? unclear. But now the development stage of service robot industry is roughly the period before the birth of iPhone 1, so it will take time. We agree that 2023 will be a turning point. " Chen said.
Through the development process of many emerging industries, start-ups can only get the last share if they enter before the arrival of the tuyere, and the service robot market is no exception. At the initial stage of such development, on the one hand, the product form has not yet been determined, on the other hand, the technology development is not enough to support the existing so-called "rigid demand", and the following problems such as the inability to achieve mass production, and the user does not pay the bill, etc. for the service machine human technology company, this can be described as a dilemma.
So how can the robot manufacturers sell their products so as to have a certain hematopoietic capacity?
• hold on to details
"First of all, we need to work hard on specific functions and details. For example, the robot face line you see is very simple to look at, but only this change took us half a year, repeated debugging and modification. For consumers, they won't know how much effort you've spent, and they'll think your robot looks more lovely. " Chen said.
In fact, not only President Chen's company began to work hard on some details of robots, but also many start-ups that are willing to play a big role in the service robot market began to work hard on and optimize the details of robots.
"In order to let you work in the company pay close attention to the situation at home and give accurate instructions to the robot in time, we integrate three technologies: speech recognition, speech text conversion and semantic understanding to improve the accuracy of the robot's execution of instructions. In this case, even if the sentence you say is a new sentence for the robot, it will combine the keywords and semantics in the sentence to execute and give timely feedback. " Another domestic service robot start-up CEO also said in an interview.
To some extent, coworth's sweeper robot is to seize a just need of people, and strive to work hard on details to make the user experience better, so as to open up the market. Of course, the existing home service robots are much more complex than the functional robots, but the way to enter the market actually has the same magic.
• solve mass production problems
Even if we can find a way to open up the market, for many domestic robot manufacturers, the problem of mass production is even more urgent.
"As an agent, when I communicate with many robot manufacturers in China, the most important question I ask is" when can your robot be mass produced? " Few people can give me a guarantee of mass production in a short period of time. " The head of a domestic robot agent pointed out.
For this problem, robot companies that have gained a good market share in the world explained to us in an interview:
"We can mass produce. On the one hand, in different links of robot production process, we have a large number of hardware, manufacturing and other partners to make robots into assembly line products together. Secondly, the cost of our products is less than half of the existing market price, and the precise control of cost is also our competitiveness. "
Obviously, many factors, such as market immaturity, cost and regulation, together lead to the "difficult production" of many manufacturers.
From the perspective of market, many robot manufacturers agree that the b-end market is now the lifeguard.
"Now it seems that the b-end market will be better, so our main business is to focus on enterprise users and provide customized commercial service robots for specific application scenarios, such as schools, courts, restaurants and other scenarios." Chen said.
In general, there is a rigid demand and market for service robots. Therefore, for domestic robot manufacturers, it is the most important thing to be patient, seize the demand, concentrate on building a good product, and solve the problems of mass production and cost.
