How to use Tmall Elf What are the functions of Tmall Elf?
Amazon's Echo, Google's home and Apple's HomePod all bet on this "entrance". Although foreign monks can recite scriptures, it involves the experience of speech recognition, so whether from the perspective of service integration or comprehensive experience, the domestic market needs a "local monk" more.
Black and white feels good.
The whole product is designed in two stages.
How does the Tmall Elf use the Ali Tmall Elf experience?
A skin-like coating feels good.
The attention of Tmall Elf in appearance seems to be not so high, but as a smart home product, I think it is still necessary to talk about the issue of face value.
Tmall Elf adopts the cylindrical design commonly used in most speaker products, with segmented visual effects up and down. The "upper body", the top and most parts are covered with a skin-like coating, which feels very smooth and has a checkered effect on it. Tmall logo
The "lower body" is the speaker of Tmall Elf, and the surface is wrapped with gauze. The design of the cylinder allows the Tmall Elf to produce 360-degree sound effects.
Speaker position
The power socket is at the bottom.
The Tmall Elf is powered by a DC power cord, and the jack has a relatively hidden design at the bottom to keep the appearance as clean as possible. At the bottom of the Tmall Elf, there is another circle of light through which people can see the status of the Tmall Elf, such as recognizing and receiving instructions.
If there are some problems, such as the Wi-Fi connection can't be reached or the network can't be found, the light band will turn red to remind users. I think the overall effect is good, which not only has enough visual reminders, but also does not disturb users and cause "light pollution".
Six-microphone radio array
When the top is open.
The top of the Tmall Elf should be the core part of this product. On it, we can see six openings, and these are its six highly sensitive microphones. This design can receive sounds from all directions.
The middle part is the mute button. When pressed, the speaker will be muted and will not receive voice commands, which is also a setting to protect users' privacy. There are touch volume keys on both sides of the mute key, which are arranged into "+"and "-"with LED lights.
Light band at the bottom
There will be a red light when there is a problem with the network.
Lights when receiving instructions.
In fact, for this product, there is nothing wrong with the design, there are no highlights that have to be mentioned, and there are no unacceptable slots. It is the product of the thinking of a typical "scientific man".
Of course, in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the design itself. As a smart speaker, its "internal" effect on the processing, feedback and playback of voice commands has attracted more attention.
Speech recognition deserves to satisfy "bad taste"
The next step is to test the true strength of the Tmall Elf. After all, voice commands and what it can do are the most important things in this smart speaker.
In terms of hardware, I just mentioned that its attributive has six array microphones for speech recognition. Ali officials say that they have collected a lot of noise that may be generated in the home environment, so that Tmall Elf can be awakened even if there is noise. And he can also learn, that is, after staying in a fixed family environment for a period of time, he will know what kind of noise is more targeted.
The networking process is simple.
Of course, for many voice processing tasks, Tmall Elf is equipped with chips specially developed by MediaTek for intelligent voice industry, which are optimized in decoding, noise reduction and multi-channel coordination. This chip also has an independent NEON processor, which also improves the speed of speech processing.
Opening the screen is the iconic statement of Tmall Elf.
The first time you use Tmall Elf, you need to download the official application for pairing. The pairing process is very simple. Press and hold its mute button for a long time, and enter the password of WiFi on the mobile phone to complete the connection. After the connection is successful, you will find that the voice of Tmall Elf is very natural. Officially, it was selected from 100, and the voice packet interface will be opened in the future. At this time, I made up a scene using Lao Luo's voice package myself. ...
In the Skills tab, we can see what the Tmall Elf can do.
On the Tmall Elf app side, there are four tabs. The first one is the text version that users communicate with Tmall Elf. The user's voice command and the response of Tmall Elf are reflected here.
The second is skill. Here you can see what the Tmall Elf can do. There are several categories, including function recommendation and common functions of users.
Third, entertainment, you can choose music or audio books to play, which is more targeted for the properties of speakers;
The fourth is "mine", which is actually some specific settings and viewing interfaces, such as previously collected programs or managing smart home products and alarm clocks. Users can also manage personal voiceprints here.
Introduction to each category in Skills
Tmall Elf uses the Chinese semantic understanding engine developed by Ali Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and especially optimizes the commonly used instructions in the home environment, such as timing, reminder, weather, home control, shopping and other fields. Our recognition accuracy is still very high during the whole use process, but occasionally other people speak loudly, which interferes with the recognition effect.
Support multiple rounds of dialogue
It is worth mentioning that Tmall Elf supports multiple rounds of dialogue. For example, after you ask about today's weather, you can continue to ask "What about yesterday?" Or "How about tomorrow?" . This is still very obvious for the promotion of "communication", and it can also weaken the attributes of the machine and make the dialogue more natural.
The resources of the entertainment part are still relatively advantageous.
According to the actual experience, the response speed of Tmall Elf is still good. When the user says "Tmall Elf", it will react and prepare to recognize the next instruction. At this time, it will also say "I am here, you say". This is also the opening screen of Tmall Elf app.
In fact, as can be seen from the skill label on the app side, the advantage of Tmall Elf on the content side is still very obvious. The music part is provided by Xiami Music, and the online content of Himalayan fm is also connected to the Tmall Elf platform. There are no problems with constellations and children's books, especially the shopping link is definitely the strength of Tmall Elf. It can query prices, purchase goods and logistics.
Automatic Association of Smart Home Products in Ali Intelligence
I believe that more users are focusing on the control of smart homes, which should also be the most used scenario. Because Tmall Elf needs to log in with Taobao account, it is very convenient for users to automatically synchronize their smart devices and the same account in Ali Smart.
Before communicating with the product manager in charge of Tmall Elf, they also revealed that they will support more brands of smart home products in the future, which is definitely a good thing for users.
In fact, Tmall Elf can not only do these "serious things", but also satisfy the bad taste of many users. For example, you can try telling the Tmall Elf to play a sound to guess animals, or you can make it flip a coin (guess right or wrong). Although its function is very small, sometimes it really makes people feel quite interesting.