From downtown Seattle, USA, it only takes 25 minutes to drive to "1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA98039", a 66,000-square-foot private mansion on the shore of Lake Washington.This is the "smartest home in the world" build by Bill Gates. It spent $63 million in 7 years.

Here, various facilities, home appliances and sensors are connected through the network and controlled by computers intelligently: temperature, lighting and ventilation will be automatically adjusted according to environmental changes; plants can be automatically watered; if there is a fire, it will automatically fire alarm; Even wherever every visiting guest goes, the lights and music will be turned on for you in advance.

"Isn't this a smart home?" Many people may ask, we have become accustomed to the many technologies and scenarios it uses. Why is it called a "model of future life"?

It was completed in 1997. That year, there was no WeChat, no Weibo; no Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba; mobile phones could only call and send text messages; even the total number of Internet users in China was only 620,000. In that era when even the Internet was still barren, it was indeed a well-deserved "house of the future."

However, after more than 20 years, the life that once belonged to the richest man in the world has gradually entered the homes of ordinary people. Many technologies that had to be realized with countless human and financial resources and technologies are now within reach of everyone, and even more "dreamy".

For example, in order to connect all the devices together, the cable length in the room alone reached 52 miles; today, the ubiquitous WiFi and 4G and even 5G networks make it unnecessary for every family to set up complicated Network, you can get an equally smart home.

The development of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud, Internet of Things, edge computing and other technologies has made our smart home dreams more and more reflected in reality.

In the era of Smart Home 3.0, what changes will our lives have?

The development of smart homes 

The development of smart homes has roughly gone through three stages

In 1984, United Technologies Building System renovated an old building in Hartford, Connecticut, USA, and used computers to monitor and control the building’s air-conditioning, elevators, lighting and other equipment in the world. That was the first "intelligent building". This is also currently recognized, the starting point for the smart home from concept to reality.

However, the intelligentization at that time was still in the pioneering period, and it needed to be directly connected through a fixed cable and used for on-site computer control. The application scenarios were extremely limited, so it was generally called the "pre-smart home era".

It was not until 1997, marked by the official completion of the Bill Gates mansion, that the era of smart homes really came. Among them, before 2014 is the 1.0 era, and the characteristics of this stage are networking and automation.Simply put, it connects multiple facilities to the same system through a centralized control network connection, and makes automated responses according to the required scenarios, and can even realize remote management.

In 2014, with Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung and other large companies successively expanding the layout of smart home platforms, smart home has entered the 2.0 era.

The characteristics of stage 2.0 are perceivable and interactive. On the one hand, smart devices collect real-time external data through sensors and actively perceive user needs. On the other hand, users can also actively manage devices and obtain services in a smarter and more convenient way. Users' home services are more convenient and smarter.Especially the smart speakers represented by Echo and Tmall Genie allow users to get rid of the screen, let go of their hands, and directly interact with smart devices through voice, and the development of the entire smart home industry can be fully accelerated.

And now, we have come to a new time node again.On the one hand, a large number of emerging technologies are driving product innovation and industrial transformation; on the other hand, the cognition and concepts of the new generation of consumer groups are constantly upgrading.

With two-wheel drive, the 3.0 era of smart home has opened the door to us. At this stage, the smart home has a real "smart". The device can not only perceive the outside world and interact with users, but also use artificial intelligence and edge computing, based on scenarios and big data, to actively provide users with personalized services that they currently need.

The era of Smart Home 3.0

A major change that the Smart Home 3.0 era will bring to us is the rise of "Smart Life".From the supply side, the development and iteration of new technologies has driven the upgrade of various equipments, products are becoming more intelligent, and services are becoming more and more accurate.

On the demand side, the new generation of ethnic groups represented by the post-80s and post-90s is experiencing tremendous changes in consumer demands and concepts. They are willing to pay for their interests, for their beauty, for experience, and for fashion; they are willing to use smart tools to free their hands and improve the quality of life.

This trend has gradually emerged in the past few years, and it will be further accelerated in the future.As of 2020, the scale of China's smart home industry has been close to 450 billion yuan, but most of us have not yet felt the subversion of the smart home experience. The core reason is that in the past, most of the products we used were independent products, lacking interaction with each other, and the experience was highly fragmented.But in the era of smart home 3.0, they will more and more get through each other, provide data, services and experience together according to the scenarios we need, and finally build a "whole house smart system" like Bill Gates "House of the Future" ".

In this system, those devices that we use the most frequently and have the strongest interaction capabilities will become the interaction portal and business hub connecting us with the entire system.Among them, the most promising one is smart speakers.

Since Double Eleven in 2017, Alibaba’s "Tmall Genie X1" became the first smart speaker product in China that sold more than 1 million units. In the past 3 years, the Chinese smart speaker market has been growing explosively. From 100,000 units to 45.89 million units in 2019, the shipment volume has increased by more than 450 times in just three years.

As of the end of 2019, the stock of smart speaker users in China has exceeded 70 million.More importantly, in addition to the core competitiveness of voice interaction, driven by the three giants of Alibaba, Xiaomi and Baidu, smart speakers have taken the lead in completing the construction of applications and cooperation ecosystems among all smart devices. Smart home products have realized interoperability.The mature voice interaction portal represented by smart speakers will drive the overall consumer IoT development.

This is exactly the general trend of the moment. Driven by the core products represented by smart speakers, the era of entire smart home 3.0 has come to us quickly.