Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. of China this week rolled out an affordable voice assistant speaker, analogous to Echo of Amazon.com Inc. This launch is the company’s first assault into home devices that are based on artificial intelligence. The “Tmall Genie,” dubbed after Tmall, the e-commerce platform of the company, has a price tag of 499 Yuan ($73.42), which is considerably less than other counterparts by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon that range from $120 to $180.
These gadgets are triggered by voice commands to carry out tasks such as searching for weather reports, checking calendars, control smart-home devices, changing music, using Internet connectivity, and artificial intelligence. Top tech companies of China have goals to become global leaders in AI as companies, including Amazon and Alibaba, progressively compete for the similar markets.
Top search engine in China, Baidu, which has spent in an artificial intelligence laboratory with the Government of China, lately rolled out a gadget based on its own Siri-like “Duer” operating system. The Tmall Genie is presently designed to employ Mandarin as its mother tongue and will only be accessible in China. It is triggered when a recognized user utters “Tmall Genie” in Chinese. In a published demonstration this week, engineers asked the device to deliver and buy some Coca Cola, add credit to a phone, play music, and activate TV and a smart humidifier.
The gadget, which comes in white and black, can also be asked to purchase goods from the Tmall platform of the company, a function analogous to Echo device of Amazon. Alibaba has spent heavily in big data capabilities and offline stores in an effort to capitalize on the whole supply chain as fraction of its retail plan and progressively drawing judgments with analogous policies accepted by Amazon. It lately commenced launching unstaffed coffee shops and brick-and-motor grocery, utilizing QR codes that customers can scan to finish payment on its Alipay application, which has more than 450 Million customers. In December, Amazon rolled out an analogous concept of stores.
Let us see as to where and when this war will end and how it will be profitable for mankind.###
