Since 2000, the smart home industry has seen different players each year, many with distinct characteristics, primarily focusing on perception, judgment, and action control logic. For years, various industry players have strived for centralized control of multiple interconnected devices. Currently, the industry has all the necessary roles: chips, solutions, products, integration, and cloud services, with clear role definitions. Therefore, the vertical stage of the entire smart home industry chain is complete. The current comprehensive control also represents a historical turning point. The ever-changing laws of intelligent technology have propelled smart homes into a new IoT era based on AI.

"Whole-house intelligence" was a buzzword in the 2018 smart home industry. Since smart homes are derivatives of the home environment, and residences are the carriers of smart devices, and real estate is the carrier of residences, "whole-house intelligence" primarily refers to whole-home smart home solutions for real estate projects. This comprehensive smart home solution first emerged among wireless whole-home system manufacturers. With the surge in demand for smart real estate and the advancement of the high-end finished housing market, whole-house intelligence has begun to be implemented in numerous projects. The impact of devices entering thousands of homes and the direction of commercial breakthroughs are areas of great interest and speculation.

The intersection of smart home applications is expanding. Device companies are increasingly interacting with internet platforms, real estate developers, operators, decoration and renovation companies, building materials and home furnishing companies, and hotels. These new connections share a common attribute—they revolve around people's lives and human services, using smart hardware and software to build new lifestyles. This is the mission of smart homes and the root of the current multiple intersections.

The chemical reactions of numerous intersections have given rise to more cloud-based online and offline services. This is a phased achievement and foreshadows a future era of diversified interaction. Smart services are being packaged and delivered to users through different intersections and scenarios, transforming previously fragmented scenarios into a broad scene matrix across various aspects of daily life.

As smart homes enter a new "integrated home furnishing era," they will break down the information silos of various intelligent points. With product and channel integration, smart hardware devices will carry information exchange and consumer services, organically integrating many aspects of life. When the smart home concept is integrated into every aspect of life, it will become a complete entity, an inseparable part of the living industry.

Internet giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have built IaaS and PaaS platforms; intermediate solution providers such as Aqara and Tuya have built SaaS platforms; the three major operators have built interconnected platforms; and mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and vivo have built ecosystem platforms. All are using their platform capabilities to attract third-party hardware and build ecological barriers. Whether it's attracting a large army of hardware ecosystems through core interactive hardware, attracting third-party devices through communication terminals, or building ecological barriers through e-commerce channels or AI empowerment, it's all about a large-scale integration of resources in the smart home industry chain.

Numerous smart home companies are leveraging the power of platforms to break down interconnection barriers. However, this breakthrough is still localized. Compared to the previous era of individual efforts, the current ecological construction has made progress, achieving more device interconnection, scene construction, and experience enhancement. The future will be one of win-win cooperation between platform-level players, building a truly interconnected smart home era.

The demand for smart real estate, smart communities, smart hotels, and smart offices is becoming increasingly apparent. However, unlike previous years, the ultimate goal of smart home projects has evolved from control needs to operational thinking.

Take smart real estate as an example. A few years ago, the real estate industry was in an era of self-appreciation and premium pricing. Real estate developers did not pay attention to synchronization with smart homes. Starting in 2018, real estate developers began to generally focus on the value-added effect of intelligence on houses, transforming their roles from developers to life operators. The goal is to create more connections between each homeowner's daily life and the real estate company. In other words, real estate is driving smart homes into pre-installed residential buildings, as mentioned in the introduction—"whole-house intelligence." The ultimate goal is to use devices to connect with communities and surrounding commercial operations to become operators of users' lifestyles and services.

From the early simple O2O to today's smart living and smart communities, real estate developers have been making breakthrough attempts around intelligence, securing a position in the era of intelligent demand. As explained in "whole-house intelligence," residences are the carriers of smart home devices, and the carriers of residences are real estate developers. While connecting property management, real estate developers have the strength and ability to seamlessly connect smart homes and smart communities, unifying user IDs, and have the opportunity to become core players in the intelligent era, especially with a comprehensive effort in the existing and property markets. Real estate developers can achieve the implementation of intelligence by integrating resources to meet demand.

Starting from the whole-home field, integrating standardized integration into community, office, and hotel scenarios creates a new smart home business model, extending centralized control to a wider range and adding operational thinking to device interconnection.

China's AI chips and IoT chips are gradually catching up with those of Western countries. With the full-scale explosion of smart home hardware, it will inevitably feed back into chip innovation. The market size of smart homes is considerable.

In recent years, we have focused on the application layer. The underlying sensor technology has always been a very niche category in smart homes. Intelligence is inseparable from sensor technology, and different smart home systems require support from different sensor data. AI deep learning requires data collection from IoT sensors. Single-device single-sensor implementation is no longer a challenge; the future will be a combination of multiple sensors for intelligent interaction.

Sensors transmit processed data to smart terminals via cloud platforms and local area networks, prompting various subsystems to make adjustments to adapt to the environment. Smart home sensors are developing towards miniaturization, intelligence, multi-functionality, and networking. In the future, sensing will exist within intelligence; whole-house intelligence will be as ubiquitous as air, as natural as breathing; users will unconsciously experience the convenience brought by smart homes.

AI is becoming more powerful, having moved from the era of weak artificial intelligence to the era of strong artificial intelligence. The technological iterations of the next few years will be based on upgrades to existing technologies; AI and big data will heavily build the technological foundation.

Smart homes require AI; AI will become the technological foundation for building smart home ecosystem connections and a catalyst for new business models, connecting control and data connections to catalyze new business models. With the influx of AI into smart homes, voice-based control has fully exploded; the next few years will focus on the application of visual recognition, achieving a comprehensive "voice control" + "face access" experience.

Traditional smart home companies, driven by new technologies such as AI, will evolve from a control role to a platform and medium, integrating more user consumer services into the home. At the same time, edge computing makes local control smoother; using AI, big data, and cloud computing, the "cloud + edge + end" model will be widely adopted by companies.

In the home domain, we have been searching for a "phone-like" next-generation interactive product, an extremely high-frequency interactive hardware device, originally expected to be a smart speaker, now a smart speaker with a screen; especially with the impetus of domestic and foreign internet giants, the past two years have seen competition in this smart speaker form factor. When a smart speaker is equipped with a screen, users control the device by voice, and the interface provides feedback, making the experience more user-friendly.

For internet companies, the value of a new interactive product surpasses the hardware itself; it will become a carrier of new-era value and data; the giant companies of the IoT era will be data companies.

For example, the explosion of smart speakers and smart locks has given smart home companies hope, resolving long-standing implementation challenges.

The explosion of single products is not over yet. After the multi-point explosion of single products and the gradual improvement of functions, the increasing user needs and quantity will feed back to the system-level whole-home market, which may trigger a comprehensive explosion in the smart whole-home field. For example, smart locks will enter the thousand-yuan era, becoming more affordable while meeting the needs of different groups of people, and allowing smart homes to truly return to simplicity.

The value of microsystem kits is highlighted; for example, voice-based kits, HomeKit-based kits, sensor-based kits, audio-based kits, panel-based kits, security-based kits, and kits based on Door Locks etc., are breaking into retail terminals; smart homes will fully enter the C-end market; the attempt of kits is also a manifestation of the maturity of product forms.

From the second half of last year to the present, almost every brand has been doing kit sales; the essence of kit sales is the so-called small scene connection, which can connect effective pain-point scenarios through a small system. In fact, single products like smart locks and smart clothes dryers are also small systems with distributed scene attributes.

Companies should focus on scene-based connections rather than connections for the sake of connections; companies that make purposeless connections will continue to face death and be eliminated by history.

Especially widely distributed, high-frequency use, easy operation, and aesthetically pleasing smart panels have become the best entry point and interactive terminal for realizing home intelligence control; wall-mounted 86-type and top-mounted smart voice panels will compete with wall-mountable and top-mountable miniaturized smart speakers in the next round of entry-level competition.

　　Currently, with the oversupply of phone screens and the decline in screen costs, the cost-effectiveness of screen-based scene panels and screen-based speakers will improve, and a large number of smart home devices with screens will be born.

For domestic smart homes, Zigbee remains the leading wireless control protocol, but with the iteration of low-power mesh Bluetooth, next year may see a small explosion, which may have a certain impact on Zigbee's dominance. The commercialization of high-speed 5G networks will also have a significant impact on the overall product form and control experience of smart homes.

Low-power wide-area protocols such as Lora and NB-IoT are also gradually being developed into more subsystems of smart homes; we will see a large number of companies trying to commercialize such wireless protocol products.

Driven by smart speakers over the past two years, we have clearly felt various disturbances in the C-end smart voice camp; especially after internet companies entered the smart home hardware market through voice technology, the balance of the traditional B-end voice ecosystem has been significantly broken; in the future C-end smart voice ranking battle, there will still be a 2-3 year window of opportunity.

　　We have always regarded gateways as an independent form of low-power protocols; traditional gateways connect directly to routers, while companies in the router market want to achieve a router gateway revolution through the integration of Bluetooth Mesh, etc., allowing users to buy a router that is also a gateway, becoming a new type of core home device, which is a beneficial model for operators and router devices.

　　Smart homes carry security and belonging; future technology companies will surely win with data; smart homes carry massive user data, which will be a new starting point for the birth of future giants.

　　Smart homes are evolving into smart living; everyone will use more smart home products; the battle for the high ground in the C-end smart home market has just begun; we are at the starting point of the C-end mass consumption of smart homes; with smart locks entering the thousand-yuan era and smart speakers entering the hundred-yuan era, the market has been successfully pioneered.