Summary of Amazon, Google, and Apple's Smart Home Measures [Overseas Trends]

At CES, Amazon Echo's artificial intelligence, Alexa, became a hot topic, but in smart homes, major companies in Silicon Valley, led by Amazon, are announcing smart home services one after another. Therefore, in this article, we briefly summarized the movements of Amazon, Google, and Apple.

As the smart home market is growing rapidly, many companies are working on developing products to meet various market demands. Major companies such as Google (US), Apple (US), Amazon (US), Samsung (Korea) and Xiaomi (China) are seen as leaders in the smart home market, driving the development of the industry. Small start-up companies are also attracting attention for developing and providing innovative new products.

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Amazon Echo Developed Around Amazon

Amazon was one of the first companies to enter the smart home market in the United States. The main product in the market, the voice-controlled home assistant "Amazon Echo," is the fourth major product after Amazon's retail market press, Amazon Prime and AWS.

More than 5 million units have already been sold since the Amazon Echo was developed.

Echo is a cloud-based device that can connect to the internet and provide a variety of voice-controlled services. In addition, at the CES 2017 exhibition, Echo announced partnerships with smart home device providers and home appliance makers such as LG, Whirlpool, GE and Samsung to increase the smart home market share with Echo at the center. is aiming for

In addition, Echo's sister product Echo Dot is also sold as a holiday gift like Christmas, and has a reputation for being a smart home device that customers can easily use in their daily lives.

The most important part of Echo's brain is an artificial intelligence system called "Alexa", which is activated by calling "Alexa" when the user commands Echo. To bring Echo to more businesses, Amazon has launched the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), a free programming suite of APIs. Through this, corporate developers will be able to use the company's devices with the Echo.

When we talk about voice-recognition artificial intelligence like Alexa, besides Amazon Echo, we have Google Assistant, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. In 2016, Google announced a voice speaker home assistant called Google Home. For Echo and comparison, Google Home has some advantages over Alexa when asked, for example, "What caused World War I?"

Alexa has partnered with a number of companies to already offer voice-controlled services on the Echo. Google, on the other hand, has been making rather slow progress in working with other companies.

Related article: Try Amazon Echo! Experiences created by IoT never cease to excite smart homes at CES 2017

Google expands into various fields with Google Home, NEST, and Brillo

On the other hand, in January 2014, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion, far exceeding the market value at the time. acquired and entered the smart home market.

Since then, companies around the world have been developing products and systems to meet the demands of the smart home market. Google has deep pockets, so it often buys existing companies when it enters new markets. However, acquisitions of highly influential companies like Nest will not increase market share in the long term without core technologies and services in the IoT market.

So Google created the Google Home, which is similar to the Amazon Echo.

We also developed an operating system called Brillo in the field of IoT platforms.

Brillo is created from the Android system and enables data communication between Brillo devices, smartphones and the Internet through the programming language Weave.

By the way, Nest, which was acquired by Google, makes the Nest thermostat (Nest), a room temperature thermostat with a learning function.

Nest detects people in the house, analyzes their patterns in the cloud, learns them, and then adjusts the room temperature only when people are present. Because of this, Nest also has the characteristics of an AI robot, so there is also the idea that it is a kind of "robot".

Nest, unlike other Google-acquired companies, continues to use the Nest name and has operational autonomy.

On top of that, backed by Google's deep pockets, Nest has acquired several smart home companies, including Revolv.

In 2014, we acquired Dropcam, a surveillance camera manufacturer, and started using it by integrating it with the company's smoke detector and thermostat products. In addition to the US and some European countries, where the company already sells, it is developing new markets in Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain, and plans to launch security cameras, thermostats and smoke detectors.

Related article: Changes to CES2017. With Google and Amazon becoming agents of smart homes, partnerships with NVIDIA, HUAWEI, etc. are accelerating CES2017 report 1 Google announces new smartphone "Pixel", smart home "Google Home", etc.

Apple follows

Unlike Amazon and Google, Apple doesn't develop smart home products, but Homekit, a smart home communication, became available with the release of iOS 8. .

The aim is to allow users to manage their home appliances with their iPhones. Many companies are actively developing device systems that can be controlled by Homekit.

Among them, one of the most famous examples is the Dutch electronics company philips "hue".

Currently, Homekit's usefulness is often questioned because it doesn't pop up security alarm notifications, and the license and trial period are said to take over a year. Because there is something that is hindering third party developers.

There are a number of reasons why Apple is so cautious about the long activation times for Homekit smart home devices.

First of all, if you look back at the history of the Apple company, it has suffered big failures in the acquisition of many technology companies. After that, Steve Jobs returned to the company and Apple decided to focus on development only on the core technology of smartphones.

It is also believed that Apple intends to serve the smart home market as just a platform provider in the future.

Crowdfunding startup Canary

The last thing I would like to introduce is Canary, a home security company in New York that was launched through crowdfunding.

In the field of security cameras, Canary's security cameras feature 1080p HD video and also features such as warning alarms, temperature and air quality sensors. In November 2016, Canary was awarded Internet Security Certification for being the first smart home device by ICSA Labs, an independent arm of Cybertrust.

Canary's flagship product, the Canary security camera, has a sleek cylindrical shape and thanks to its 147-degree lens, which is 17 degrees wider than Nest's Nest Cam, the Canary camera's inspection is It is said that it is considerably high.

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