smart home evolution

China’s Smart Home Evolution: From Automation to Artificial Intelligence

Karl, who is in the process of renovating his new home, was recently caught in a tangle, “Before I could figure out how to put in a complete smart home, the base of the home was already being installed.”

In fact, Karl didn’t know much about smart home, and didn’t know how to get started, thinking, “It would be perfect if we could design it all at once.” Karl is the epitome of thousands of users in the process of China’s smart home evolution, and they are full of doubts about how to start the smart home.

For intelligent life, it must be in everyone’s mind that there is a setting. For example, reverse into the garage, and the air conditioning automatically opens to the right temperature; face recognition into the house, the lights automatically open to the home mode; sitting on the sofa, the TV automatically opens and adjusts to the usual programs; lying down on the bed and say: I’m going to sleep, the house will automatically turn off the lights, close the unnecessary power supply; the morning out of the door, the room is automatically opened to leave the house! Mode and the sweeping robot turn on the work …….

However, “the ideal is vibrant, the reality is very bony.” most smart home consumers either use a bunch of APP on the phone, a variety of interfaces and operating methods daze, or a voice control system to practice Mandarin.

It seems that there is always a distance between technological innovation and consumers, and accurate whole-house intelligence is never fully realized in the average consumer’s home.

20 Years of Smart Home Evolution

What exactly is what we call a smart home?

Smart home can be said to be the embodiment of IOT under the influence of the Internet. The so-called smart home refers to the residence as a platform. The use of integrated wiring technology, network communication technology, security technology, automatic control technology, and audio and video technology will be the integration of facilities related to home life to build a highly efficient management system of residential facilities and family schedule affairs.

Smart home evolution was relatively early. In the 1930s, the Chicago World’s Fair, for the first time, the concept of the “House of the Future”. At the same time, the concept of home automation also appeared for the first time.

In 1950, the design drawings of the concept of “button manor” became the first home space with a fundamental automation concept; in 1985, the birth of the Kissimmee world outside the world, the idea of human-computer interaction appeared for the first time; in 1999, Microsoft released a smart home promotional video, which basically succeeded in predicting the current shape of the Internet of Things (IoT) smart home. Internet smart home form.

Smart Home Concept Map of Push Button Manor

In fact, as early as 1995, the United States and Singapore have been promoting a large number of smart homes. The average installation of a smart home consumption is up to 7,000 U.S. dollars, but the utilization rate is only 0.3%.

During this period, the smart home industry is also still in its infancy. The entire industry is in a conceptual product awareness stage. No professional smart home manufacturers appear.

By about 2000, as China’s standard of living continued to improve, the demand for improving the living environment and enhancing the comfort of living also continued to increase, and the smart home industry slowly entered the early stages of smart home evolution.

At that time, China mainly promoted the smart home evolution by replacing manual operation with mechanical home equipment. For example, the automatic management of home appliances, curtains, garage doors, and other equipment can reduce the amount of user labor, but the intelligence level is low. Most of them are only applied in engineering installations, mainly in building intercoms, fire protection, and electrical control systems, and rarely in home decoration.

With the iterative upgrading of technology, smart home single products slowly began to appear, such as smart door locks, smart lighting, smart TVs, etc. China’s smart home industry has entered a early period of smart home evolution, but the single products are isolated from each other and can not be connected to communicate.

With the rise of companies such as Dua, Hikvision, and Sailings, as well as the maturity of RF, WiFi, 4G, and other technologies, the smart home has entered the Internet of Things stage. Devices such as motorized curtains that can be linked and controlled, as well as remote monitoring cameras, are slowly becoming popular in family life.

At this stage, more than fifty smart home R&D and production enterprises have been established in China, mainly concentrated in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Hangzhou, Xiamen, and other places. The marketing and technical training system of smart homes is also gradually improved.

Until around 2015, the domestic smart home industry ushered in the era of quantitative growth, and a large number of excellent smart home brands emerged, such as Sailings, Xinhechuang, Ziguang, Nanjing IOT, Oribo, Mi System, Dade CLP, etc. At the same time, some home appliance companies are giving home appliances intelligent products, but also the layout of the smart home industry, such as Haier, the United States, Rongshida, TCL, and so on.

Smart speaker

In addition, at any time the rapid progress of intelligent voice technology, Amazon Alexa, small degree speakers, Tmall Genie, millet speakers, and so on into the tens of thousands of households, so the smart home evolution growth rate continues to upward, and further on the smart home market “popularization education”. The concept of smart home is gradually maturing.

From the liberation of labor to the intelligent life of the home, concept change can be seen as the first step of the home industry to get rid of the traditional stigma, completing the smart home industry in the form of a new external upgrade.

Smart Home Brands “To Each His Own”

In recent years, thanks to the increase in disposable income of the Chinese people and the continuous pursuit of a comfortable and quality family life, the demand for smart home products continues to grow. According to Avery Consulting estimates, China’s smart home market size may reach 536 billion yuan in 2023.

In nearly two decades of smart home evolution, three major categories are crucial, namely, smart boxes for TVs, smart routers, and smart speakers. These three categories are also regarded as entry-level terminal products by the industry.

In the face of such a huge market size, all contestants do not want to miss the opportunity to get a piece of the pie.

Today’s smart home track can be divided into four significant gangs, with Baidu, Alibaba, Amazon, and other Internet companies; Haier, Midea, and Gree as the representatives of the traditional home appliance companies; Huawei, Xiaomi, Hikvision, etc., as a typical 3C companies; and Graffiti Intelligence, Oribe, Aqara Green Rice, Sailings and other emerging startups represented by.

Smart homes, from mechanical instead of manual to single product intelligence, to intelligent interconnection, to today’s whole house intelligence, are different. Each camp, on behalf of the player’s smart home evolution strategy, is also different.

Smart lock

Internet companies seem to focus more on entry-level innovative single products, like smart audio screens and linkage control products, like Baidu, Alibaba, and Amazon, which have a place in the smart speaker market.

Traditional home appliance companies, like Haier, Midea, Gree, etc., are focused on technological upgrades around smart home appliances themselves and are more concerned about the sales of their products. For example, Haier launched the three-winged bird to promote its brand of smart out of the circle.

Xiaomi and Huawei have their ecological chain. For example, millet in the intelligent ecological chain all the way to investment, so far the whole incubation line of enterprises up to more than 400, the products include speakers, intelligent door locks/doorbell/cat eye, intelligent temperature control, lighting equipment in a number of categories.

According to Huawei’s data, Hongmeng Intelligent Union has 2,200+ partners, 250 million+ product shipments, and 2 million+ Hongmeng eco-developers, especially a large number of home appliance brands, including Midea, Gree, Fontainebleau, Jiuyang, Panasonic, and Subaru have joined. Emerging startups, on the other hand, cut into the innovation from the intelligent panel, smart control, and other critical technical areas and open the market through smart home systems and services, which belong to the open platform, allowing multiple products to intervene.

For example, Sailings not only develops smart panels, switches and sockets, smart door locks, smart cameras, smart lighting, and other smart devices but also currently joins the Matter protocol layout of the overseas market to support the ecosystem of Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Although these companies “fight” in full swing, the fact that the smart home never has a unified standard specification, the use of rigid, often disconnected, perhaps is also the biggest reason for consumers to be deterred.

According to research by Vio Experience Consulting, 62% of smart home consumers believe that the products are unable to understand users’ needs accurately, and 58% believe that the products are weak in autonomous intelligence and rely on manual settings. According to the data of the Intelligent Settlement Sub-committee of the Intelligent Standard Committee, 45% of consumers who have not yet used smart homes are worried about data privacy.

Now, the smart home is still on the road to reform. Still, it is foreseeable that with the gradual maturation of the market and technology, the future smart home experience will be more adapted to the needs of consumers and bring significant changes to the entire home furnishing industry.

How smart homes can be smarter

Nowadays, smart home has become the first choice of home decoration in the minds of most consumers. From a small light bulb to a large air conditioner, refrigerator, or integrated cooker, everything can be ‘smart’.

However, the fact is that seemingly smart home products, but there are a variety of ecosystems, different brands, and different models of products, are very likely to follow their own set of protocol standards.

Whether it’s circuit openers or security cameras, they’re all moving closer to the ecosystem, but there are still silos of information between brands and platforms. This has led to homes that look smart enough to require more special care from ‘homeowners’.

How to make the smart home “smarter” has become the key to the smart home enterprises in 2024 and even the future market competition. From the first day of its birth, the interconnection that cannot be silky smooth is the weight that the smart home cannot bear. Therefore, to break this limitation, “cross-border integration, mutual channels” has become one of the mainstream means for each enterprise player to seize the blue ocean market.

2022 is a milestone in the smart home evolution. Matter can realize the interconnection of multiple smart home platforms, including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung.

Control the same light bulb using various smart home platforms

In 2019, Apple and Google announced that they had joined the ‘Zigbee Alliance’, joining hands with more than 200 companies, including Amazon and IKEA, to develop and formulate a new smart home protocol standard.

In 2022, the Matter 1.0 protocol, jointly created by tech and home giants, made its official debut and quickly gained traction in the market. In 2024, the CSA Connectivity Standards Consortium continued to optimize the Matter standard in response to market demand and officially released the Matter 1.3 standard. According to a report by market research company ABI Research, by 2030, there will be more than 20 billion smart homes sold in the market, of which 50% to 60% may support the “Matter” protocol.

The creation of “Matter” has eased the clutter of smart home protocols.

Today, many domestic Internet makers’ home and home appliance companies are also actively building eco-channels with strategic partners so that their products in the eco-partner solutions hitch to sell out, the brand for each other as a channel, potent combination, so that the marketing path more comprehensive.

Cross-border integration mutual channels will be the mainstream trend of the smart home industry. If the product ecosystem is not complete, a single category of manufacturers or brands, this type of strategic cooperation based on “complementary advantages” is an excellent way to seize the market.

Secondly, China’s population “aging” problem continues to highlight that all kinds of “aging” policies are also increasing, and the demand for smart home “aging” upgrades also seems increasingly urgent.

Currently, voice interaction is the primary means of interaction for smart home systems. Still, for older users, not all of whom speak standard Mandarin, products sold locally must cover local dialects.

In addition, home security is the top priority for elderly users. In the event that the user encounters a sudden illness, falls, or encounters other emergencies such as gas leaks, indoor fire, etc., indoor cameras, sensors, etc., should be able to sense and notify the appropriate personnel immediately.

Smart home devices equipped with millimeter-wave radar and other technologies have been greatly improved in terms of sensing range, recognition accuracy, etc., contributing to the evolution of smart homes. This advancement promotes the quality of home life for older people and supports the aging development within the context of smart home evolution. According to IDC data, the shipment of smart home devices equipped with millimeter-wave technology in 2023 may exceed 100,000 units, marking a significant step in the smart home evolution.

Therefore, each smart home enterprise should strengthen the research and development, production, and launch to meet the elderly user groups of security care, fall recognition, and sleep monitoring of the smart home equipment, or will find a smart home evolution of new growth points.

The smart home industry is a product of continuous iterative updating. New products and new technologies emerge in an endless stream. The richer the category, the more innovative elements will be in the future of interconnection in order to make it smoother.

Taking smart locks as an example, the introduction of face locks and door lock smart screens is highly representative, starting from the consumer’s pain point and subverting the traditional security model.

Smart face door lock

In the future, the smart home industry will only be more prosperous, three-dimensional, comprehensive, and intelligent, and products with strong security identification capabilities will be more likely to capture the user’s favor.

Unlike an innovative single product, the future of the linkage of the whole house intelligent system is more complex. The installation of professional requirements is very high, so a professional, intelligent installation team is essential.

Brand to be in the “demand docking, site survey, program design, final delivery” four stages, the actual landing service users, get word of mouth, professional guidance is indispensable. For example, the United States launched the “United States smart home” whole-house intelligent solutions around the five major home scenes to provide a familiar + personality package.

The level of service and after-sales service directly affects the sense of user experience. The offline store economy is picking up, and significant companies can speed up the pace of the layout of offline stores.

Not only that, with the continuous development of artificial intelligence models, the smart home industry can use its powerful learning and understanding capabilities to meet the specific to-do items and habits of different users for different times and spaces and ultimately line up into a complete space full-time active service.

It is foreseeable that the future of smart home evolution is interconnection and active service.

“Smart home products must be installed, although it is still the early stages of the development of smart homes. This is, after all, the general trend of well,” Karl said with a smile.

You see, business is like that.



Get A Quote

We are glad that you preferred to contact us. Please fill our short form and one of our friendly team members will contact you back.

    X
    Get A Quote