Chapter 267 The world's first Ai speaker! Kuaidi Taxi red envelope bug!
Five days later, Chen Yansen received Liao Wei's work report.
Yunsu has preliminarily determined the acquisition price of Zhongtong, and the signing date of the equity transfer agreement is set for June 15.
Yunda Express’s revenue was 760 million, and Zhongtong’s revenue was 980 million, totaling 1.74 billion.
By the time Yunsu absorbs all of Yunda and Zhongtong’s service outlets, sorting centers, transit warehouses, and employees, it will be able to add at least 40,000 employees, with more than 30,000 new humanitarian contributions every month.
The remaining Shentong and Yuantong are still holding on, but Chen Yansen knows that these two guys can't hold on for long.
The more obvious the scale effect of Yunsu is, the lower the cost per ticket will be. The opposite is true for STO and Yuantong. As the business volume decreases, the cost per ticket becomes higher and higher.
Half a year ago, Yunsu could control the cost of small e-commerce items weighing less than one kilogram within 1.5 yuan per ticket, including costs such as transportation, delivery and equipment depreciation, but now it has dropped to 1.2 yuan.
The prices for Shentong and Yuantong increased from 1.5 yuan per ticket to 2.2 yuan.
As one grows stronger while the other declines, it will be hard for Shentong and Yuantong to survive.
Using price war to eliminate competitors has always been the only way in business warfare.
It costs money, but the effect is remarkable.
Liao Wei did a good job as CEO of Yunsu Express, and Chen Yansen had no plans to replace him. He just asked Gao Weilin to select a group of financial and legal personnel who were proficient in mergers and acquisitions to assist Liao Wei in completing the acquisition.
The successive acquisition of two express delivery companies has caused a stir in the industry, even though the news has not yet been reported.
The names of Liao Wei and Chen Yansen instantly became high-frequency words in the industry.
The boss of the courier company hates them to the core, but the couriers under them are looking forward to the day when their company will be acquired by Yunsu, so that they can live a happy life with a basic salary of 3,000 yuan, five social insurances and one housing fund, high commissions and benefits, and a monthly income of 7,000 to 8,000 yuan.
It's not that they haven't thought about changing jobs, but the volume of parcels handled by Yunsu Express is there, and nearby outlets only recruit 20-30 people each time. There are too many people and too few vacancies, so naturally it's hard to find a job.
Before leaving get off work, Chen Yansen received the appearance and hardware design drawings of the Alexa smart speaker sent by Lin Qingbai. After checking them, he replied with an "OK".
This version is Lin Qingbai's third design, and it meets Chen Yansen's requirements in all aspects.
Cylindrical design, 12 cm in diameter and 18 cm in height, moderate size, easy to carry and suitable for home placement.
The outer shell is made of ABS plastic and metal mesh structure. The top is designed with physical buttons such as switch, mute button, volume knob, and is equipped with a ring-shaped LED light strip.
Blue indicates standby mode, green indicates responding, and red indicates device connection failure. Colors are used to provide feedback on the real-time status of the product.
The main control chip uses a TI OMAP 3630, which can effectively reduce power consumption while ensuring performance. It is also equipped with an ADAU1761 DSP audio decoder, which supports stereo recording and playback and has ultra-high sampling accuracy and audio processing capabilities.
The core of the voice module is 6 omnidirectional MEMS microphones arranged in a ring, which supports wake-up function within 5 meters.
In offline mode, the embedded speech analysis interaction engine has 20 basic commands built in. Users can connect to the cloud server via WiFi to experience the full-powered version of the Alexa smart speaker.
The material cost is 310 yuan, and the price must be at least 599, 699, or even 799 or 899 yuan to have a certain profit margin.
There is no way around it; the hardware costs were high in 2012.
Chen Yansen thought about it and sent a message to Wang Teng, asking him to call Zhou Chuangxi, Ye Qiuping and Yan Peng, the person in charge of Orange Mall, to come upstairs for a meeting.
Three minutes later, there was a knock on the door.
"Come in!" Chen Yansen responded.
As the four of them came in, they were attracted by the Alexa smart speaker on the screen.
The cylindrical body has a matte plastic panel on the top embedded with a circular LED light strip, and a metal mesh cover wrapping the speaker. The design looks simple, but it vaguely exudes a sense of technology that is ahead of its time.
They knew that this was the first application product of the Moss smart voice assistant.
"Boss, has it been finalized?" Zhou Chuangxi asked first.
"Let's just stick with this version. If we keep going on, I'm afraid Lin Qingbai will just quit and run away." Chen Yansen joked with a smile.
"Boss, how much is the price?" Wang Teng asked with concern.
If the price is too low, there will be no profit; if the price is too high, there will be no sales.
Frankly speaking, he does not have much confidence in this product. The material cost of Alexa smart speaker is only a few dozen yuan cheaper than Orange D1, and the most reasonable price is 699 yuan.
But in 2012, how many people are willing to buy a speaker for 699 yuan? Wouldn’t it be nice to add another 100 yuan and buy an Orange D1? "It's 799 yuan in China and 199 US dollars in overseas markets. Oh, and let Paramount know. If they are willing to share their peripheral sales channels with Orange Technology, we can give them a 5% to 10% commission for each unit. The lower the better. I'll leave it to you."
Chen Yansen turned his head and looked at Ye Qiuping and said.
"Okay, boss." Ye Qiuping responded quickly.
"As for the software ecosystem, the domestic market currently integrates Douban FM, Xiami Music, QQ Music, Toutiao, Penguin News, Sohu News and the weather forecast function of the Meteorological Bureau. The overseas market is still blank. I have found Zhou Shouzhi from DST to be an introducer. You can go directly to him tomorrow."
Afterwards, Chen Yansen gave Wang Teng another instruction.
He was put in charge of connecting with companies such as Amazon Music, Pandora, Cirrus and Wolfram Alpha to enrich the service content of the Alexa smart speaker.
Therefore, the Alexa smart speaker is destined to be launched in China first before being sold in overseas markets.
"Boss, I understand." Wang Teng nodded and agreed.
"Orange Mall can give an advance notice that on June 18th, the products will be sold simultaneously across the entire network," Chen Yansen continued.
"Okay, boss. I'll arrange for it to go online as soon as possible." Yan Peng replied.
"Boss, what about me?" Zhou Chuangxi looked around and found that he was the only one who had not received any task.
"I hope that Moss can become smarter by increasing the amount of training. Surpassing Siri is just the starting point. I have never considered Siri as a rival. Don't let down the server cluster that can perform 150 petaflops of operations per second."
Chen Yansen said slowly.
What this means is that his expectation for Moss is not as simple as surpassing Siri.
Otherwise, he would have spent a lot of money on servers to increase computing power and recruited more than a hundred experts in the field of artificial intelligence from the Lighthouse Country. It would have been completely unnecessary if it was just to make a basic version of an intelligent voice interaction engine.
"No problem." Zhou Chuangxi agreed readily.
After the short meeting, Chen Yansen waved his hand, and the four of them immediately stood up and left.
Chen Yansen did not rush to leave, but instead selected a few high-definition CG renderings and posted them on Weibo.
The copy is: "The world's first smart speaker, instant voice interaction, an artificial intelligence that can talk to you."
Chen Yansen now has 30 million followers on Weibo. In just a few minutes, tens of thousands of people liked and forwarded his posts, and the comment section gradually became lively.
"Smart speaker? What the hell is that?"
“Artificial intelligence, is it true or not?”
"Mr. Chen, when will it be online? I don't want to pay, can you give me one for free?"
"Fuck! Where did I end up when I woke up? Did I travel through time? Even artificial intelligence has a product!"
Although the Turing test was proposed seventy years ago, in 2012, the concept of artificial intelligence was not yet popular.
It was two years later that Amazon launched the world's first smart speaker Echo; and three years later that OpenAI was established.
Therefore, many people are skeptical about Orange Technology's smart speakers.
After all, in the eyes of netizens, Orange Technology's research and development capabilities are far from reaching the top level of artificial intelligence research.
"AI speaker? Orange Technology has really made it?" After receiving the news, Lei Yijun quickly took out his mobile phone, opened Chen Yansen's Weibo homepage, and repeatedly studied every detail of the Moss smart speaker.
He understood Chen Yansen's style of doing things. Since the other party even released a product preview, it at least showed that this smart speaker had certain commercial value.
But what made him angry was that apart from a few photos, Chen Yansen refused to reveal even the name of the product.
At iFLYTEK's headquarters in Luzhou, Liu Fengqing couldn't help but fall into deep thought. He also couldn't quite believe that Orange Technology had developed an intelligent voice interaction engine in less than half a year.
You should know that iFLYTEK has been deeply engaged in intelligent voice technology for more than ten years, and the current limit of its capabilities is only to convert text into speech and voice signals into text information.
As for voice interaction technology? iFLYTEK is still in the process of exploration, and the functions it has developed are very rudimentary.
For a time, netizens from all over the country were speculating about whether the built-in voice interaction engine of Orange Technology's smart speaker was stronger than that of Siri.
The next morning, the official Orange Mall released a preview link for the Moss smart speaker, which will be released at 10 a.m. on June 18 for 799 yuan.
Immediately, 70% to 80% of interested users were discouraged.
Only bloggers in the technology and digital circles are gearing up to be the first to release the product. The product is not important, they just want to get some traffic first.
Apple's CEO Cook soon heard about Orange Technology's new product, smiled disdainfully, and didn't take it seriously at all.
In his eyes, Orange Technology is just a mobile phone assembly factory with no skills required. This smart speaker is mostly a gimmick. It would be good if its interactive performance, wake-up success rate and conversation accuracy can reach one-third of Siri.
After a few days, the popularity of the Moss smart speaker gradually declined, and as the 618 e-commerce promotion approached, it was soon forgotten by netizens.
After the upgrade of the Yaomao Mall, Ali launched the "Catch the Cat" activity for the first time. At 10 o'clock and 20 o'clock every day, wait on the 618 promotion page on time, and black cats will pop up.
The gameplay is similar to whack-a-mole. After clicking with the mouse, you can get cash red envelopes ranging from 50 yuan, 100 yuan and 200 yuan. Of course, 90% of the prizes are brand coupons sponsoring the event.
Yidong released Beijing coupons worth 199-150, which are also limited for redemption at 10:00 and 20:00 every day, competing with Ali for the big promotion traffic.
Platforms such as Suning, Gome, Amazon and Yixun have launched activities such as 1 yuan flash sales and 9.9 special offers, and the products include gold bracelets, cars, Apple mobile phones, etc.
Under the operation of Huang Zheng, Pinbei has already prepared various marketing activities: coupon packages worth 5,000 yuan, group activities for three, five, one thousand and ten thousand people, limited-time flash sales, free orders, free items through bargaining and 50% off coupons.
The momentum and intensity of the event are in no way inferior to Taobao and Yidong.
at the same time.
Yanjing, Kuaidi Taxi branch.
Zhang Yunni from the product department is testing the "Kuaidi Taxi Red Packet" which is about to be launched. After working overtime for several consecutive days, she was in a daze and configured the new function in the production environment.
Ten minutes later, the risk control alarm was suddenly triggered. Zhang Yunni finally reacted and said with a bitter face: "It's over!"
(End of this chapter)
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