小爱同学月活跃设备破3千万 累计唤醒超50亿次– NetEase
What happened: Xiaomi announced that its voice AI assistant Xiaoai provides service through 30 million monthly smart devices, up over 500% in over the past six months. Xiaoai was “summoned” over 1 billion times this July with the total summoned times over 5 billion.
Why it’s important: Xiaoai was first introduced by way of Xiaomi’s smart speaker last year. But it’s now included on various Xiaomi hardware including Xiaomi’s smartphone, smart speaker, robot cleaner, etc., serving as a connection point for the company’s smartphone solutions. China’s AI assistant sector is relatively untapped while Google is still finding its way back to China and Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri only provide tarnished service in the country due to language and cultural barriers and lack of integrating hardware. Local tech giants flood in to grab the market. Alibaba rolled out AliGenie voice assistant last year; Baidu launched Raven H and mid-range smart speaker Xiaodu Zaijia; Huawei is developing its own voice assistant for China.