Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced at the company’s AIoT Developer Conference today that Xiaomi smart speaker Xiao AI has over 34 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of September, local media is reporting (in Chinese). According to Lei, Xiaomi’s smart speakers have been awakened 8 billion times by users to activate around 100 million devices.
Xiao AI is especially popular among China’s “empty nest elderly” and children, says Lei.
AI+IoT has been part of Xiaomi’s core strategy for over 5 years and will continue to be, Lei said. He believes AI+IoT technology will seep into every device within the next 3 to 5 years.
The Chinese smartphone maker has sold more than 132 million IoT devices in the last quarter—selling more consumer electronics devices than any other company in the world, Google and Apple included. According to iResearch, Xiaomi’s global market share of IoT device was 1.7%, bigger than Apple’s 0.9% and Amazon’s 0.9%, and Samsung’s 0.7%.
Separately, Xiaomi also announced a new partnership with furniture giant IKEA to collaborate on smart home appliances and furniture. IKEA’s intelligent lighting system will be integrated with Xiaomi IoT technology as soon as December.
Xiaomi isn’t the only one betting on smart speakers to be the next big consumer electronics trend. Chinese retail giant JD.com launched its first smart home speaker LingLong DingDong in 2016, which was dubbed “China’s answer to Amazon Echo.”
China’s smart speaker market is getting increasingly crowded.
According to technology market research firm Canalys, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shipped 2.2 million Tmall Genie smart speakers in the last quarter, Xiaomi shipped 1.9 million Xiao AI speakers, while Baidu shipped 1 million Xiao DU speakers, beating JD.com who was one of the first to the market.
According to Xiaomi’s third-quarter results, IoT-related businesses contributed approximately RMB 10.805 trillion to its quarterly revenue, representing an 89% percent increase compared to the previous year.