I can become stronger by paying salaries. I have one billion employees!

Chapter 266 The World's First AI Speaker! A Fast 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 had 7.6 million yuan in revenue, and Zhongtong Express had 9.8 million yuan, totaling 17.4 billion yuan.

Once Yunsu absorbs all of Yunda and Zhongtong's service outlets, sorting centers, transit warehouses, and employees, it can add at least 40,000 employees and more than 30,000 new humanitarian flames every month.

The remaining Shentong and Yuantong are still struggling, but Chen Yansen knows that these two companies won't last long.

The more obvious the scale effect of Yunsu, the lower the cost per ticket. The opposite is true for Shentong and Yuantong; as the business volume decreases, the cost per ticket increases.

Six months ago, Yunsu could control the cost of e-commerce parcels weighing less than one kilogram to less than 1.5 yuan per parcel, including transportation, delivery and equipment depreciation. But now it has dropped to 1.2 yuan.

Shentong and Yuantong have raised their prices from 1.5 yuan per shipment to 2.2 yuan.

With one side gaining at the expense of the other, it would be difficult for Shentong and Yuantong to survive.

Using price wars to eliminate competitors has always been the only way to win in business.

It's expensive, but the results are also remarkable.

Liao Wei was doing a good job as CEO of Yunsu Express, and Chen Yansen had no intention of replacing him. He simply had Gao Weilin assign a group of financial and legal personnel who were proficient in M&A to assist Liao Wei in completing the acquisition.

The acquisition of two courier companies has caused a huge stir in the industry, even though it hasn't been reported in the news yet.

The names Liao Wei and Chen Yansen instantly became frequently used terms in the industry.

The courier company boss hated them to the core, but the couriers below dreamed that one day their company would be acquired by Yunsu, and they would live a happy life with a base salary of 3000 yuan, social insurance and housing fund, high commissions and benefits, and a monthly income of 7,000 to 8,000 yuan.

They had considered changing jobs, but Yunsu Express's parcel volume was what it was, and nearby branches only recruited 20-30 people at a time. With more applicants than available positions, it was naturally difficult to find a job.

Before leaving get off work, Chen Yansen received the appearance and hardware design drawings of the Alexa smart speaker from Lin Qingbai. After reviewing them, he replied with an 'OK'.

This version is Lin Qingbai's third design, and it meets Chen Yansen's requirements in all aspects.

With a cylindrical design, a diameter of 12 cm and a height of 18 cm, it is a moderate size that is easy to carry and suitable for home placement.

The outer shell is made of ABS plastic with a metal mesh cover. The top has physical buttons such as a power switch, mute button, and volume knob, and is equipped with a ring-shaped LED light strip.

Blue indicates standby mode, green indicates response, and red indicates device connection failure. The colors are used to reflect 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 paired 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 consists of six omnidirectional MEMS microphones arranged in a ring, supporting wake-up functionality within a 5-meter range.

In offline mode, the embedded speech analysis and interaction engine has 20 basic commands built-in. Users can connect to the cloud server via WiFi to experience the full-fledged Alexa smart speaker.

The material cost is 310 yuan, so the price should be at least 599, 699, or even 799 or 899 yuan in order to have a certain profit margin.

There was no way around it; hardware costs were just too high in 2012.

Chen Yansen thought for a moment 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 knocking sound at the door.

“Go in!” Chen Yansen replied.

As soon as the four entered, they were drawn to the Alexa smart speaker on the screen.

The cylindrical body features a matte plastic panel on top with a ring-shaped LED light strip embedded in it, and a metal mesh cover surrounds the speaker. The design appears simple, yet it subtly exudes a sense of technology that is ahead of its time.

They knew that this was the first application product of Moss intelligent voice assistant.

"Boss, is the final draft ready?" Zhou Chuangxi asked first.

"Let's stick with this version. If we keep messing around with it, I'm afraid Lin Qingbai will just quit and run away," Chen Yansen joked with a smile.

"Boss, what's the price?" Wang Teng asked with great concern.

If the price is too low, there's no profit; if it's too high, there's no sales.

Frankly, he didn't have much confidence in this product. The material cost of the Alexa smart speaker was only a few dozen yuan cheaper than the Orange D1, so a price of 699 yuan was the most reasonable.

But in 2012, how many people would be willing to buy a speaker for 699 yuan?
Wouldn't it be better to add another 100 yuan and buy an Orange D1?
"It's 799 yuan in China and 199 US dollars in overseas markets. By the way, give Paramount a heads-up. If they're willing to share their peripheral sales channels with Orange Technology, we can give them a 5% to 10% commission per unit, the lower the better. You'll be in charge of that."

Chen Yansen turned his head and looked at Ye Qiuping.

“Yes, boss,” Ye Qiuping replied quickly.

"Regarding the software ecosystem, the domestic market currently integrates Douban FM, Xiami Music, QQ Music, Toutiao, Tencent News, Sohu News, and the weather forecast function of the Meteorological Bureau. The overseas market is still a blank slate. I found Zhou Shouzhi of DST to be the introducer. You can go directly to him tomorrow."

Then, Chen Yansen gave Wang Teng some more instructions.

He was put in charge of connecting with companies such as Amazon Music, Pandora, Siri, and Wolfram Alpha to enrich the service offerings of the Alexa smart speaker.

Therefore, the Alexa smart speaker is destined to be launched in China first, and then it can be sold in overseas markets.

“Boss, I understand.” Wang Teng nodded in agreement. “Orange Mall can announce it in advance; it will be available for sale online simultaneously on June 618th,” Chen Yansen continued.

“Okay, boss, I’ll arrange for it to go live as soon as possible,” Yan Peng replied.

"Boss, what about me?" Zhou Chuangxi looked around and realized that he was the only one who hadn't received a task.

"I hope Moss can become more intelligent by increasing the amount of training. Surpassing Siri is just the beginning. I have never regarded Siri as a competitor. Don't let down that server cluster that performs 1.5 quadrillion floating-point operations per second."

Chen Yansen spoke slowly and deliberately.

The implication is that his expectations for Moss are not simply to surpass Siri.

Otherwise, all that money he'd spent on servers to increase computing power, and all that luring over a hundred AI experts from the US, would have been completely unnecessary if it were just to create a basic intelligent voice interaction engine.

“No problem,” Zhou Chuangxi readily agreed.

After the short meeting, Chen Yansen waved his hand, and the four of them immediately got up and left.

Chen Yansen didn't rush to leave. Instead, he picked out a few high-definition CG renderings and posted them on Weibo.

The tagline reads: "The world's first smart speaker, with real-time voice interaction, an artificial intelligence that can converse with you."

Chen Yansen now has 3000 million followers on Weibo. In just a few minutes, tens of thousands of people liked and shared his posts, and the comment section gradually became lively.

"Smart speaker? What the heck is that?"

"Artificial intelligence, real or fake?"

"Mr. Chen, when will it be launched? I won't pay, can you send me a unit for free?"

"Holy crap! Where did I end up when I woke up? Did I time travel? Even artificial intelligence products are being made now!"

Although the Turing Test was proposed seventy years ago, the concept of artificial intelligence was not yet popular in 2012.

Two years later, Amazon launched the world's first smart speaker, Echo; three years later, OpenAI was founded.

Therefore, many people are skeptical about Orange Technology's smart speaker.

After all, in the eyes of netizens, Orange Technology's R&D capabilities are far from reaching the top level in artificial intelligence research.

"An AI speaker? Orange Technology really made it?" After receiving the news, Lei Yijun quickly took out his 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 had even released a product preview, it at least indicated that this smart speaker already had a certain commercial value.

What angered him was that Chen Yansen refused to reveal even the product name, except for a few photos.

At the iFlytek headquarters in Luzhou, Liu Fengqing couldn't help but fall into deep thought. He also found it hard to believe that Orange Technology had developed an intelligent voice interaction engine in less than half a year.

It's important to know that iFlytek has been deeply involved in intelligent voice technology for over a decade, and its current capabilities are limited to converting text into speech and speech signals into text information.

As for voice interaction technology?
iFlytek is still exploring and the functions it has developed are very basic.

For a time, netizens across the country were speculating about whether Orange Technology's smart speaker's built-in voice interaction engine was stronger or weaker than Siri.

The following morning, Orange Mall officially released a teaser link for the Moss smart speaker, announcing its release at 10:6 AM on June 18th, priced at 799 yuan.

This immediately deterred 70-80% of interested users.

Only tech and digital bloggers are all gearing up, planning to be the first to launch, regardless of the product itself, just to ride the wave of traffic.

Apple CEO Tim Cook soon heard about Orange Technology's new product, but he just smiled dismissively and didn't take it seriously at all.

In his eyes, Orange Technology is just a mobile phone assembly factory with no skill involved. This smart speaker is mostly a gimmick. Its interactive performance, wake-up success rate, and dialogue accuracy are probably only a third of Siri's.

A few days later, the popularity of the Moss smart speaker gradually declined, and with the approach of the 618 e-commerce promotion, it was quickly forgotten by netizens.

After the upgrade and redesign of the Yaomao Mall, Ali launched the "Catch the Cat" event for the first time. Every day at 10:00 and 20:00, if you wait on the 618 promotion page, black cats will pop up.

The gameplay is similar to whack-a-mole. After clicking with the mouse, you can get a cash bonus of 50 yuan, 100 yuan, or 200 yuan. Of course, 90% of the prizes are brand coupons sponsored by the event.

JD.com released a coupon for 199-150 RMB, which can also be claimed in limited quantities at 10:00 AM and 8:00 PM every day, competing with Ali for traffic during the promotion.

Platforms such as Suning, Gome, Amazon, and YiXun.com have launched promotions such as 1-yuan flash sales and 9.9-yuan special offers, with products including gold bracelets, cars, and Apple mobile phones.

Under Huang Zheng's management, Pinbei had already prepared various marketing activities: coupon packages worth 5000 yuan, group buying activities for three, five, thousand, and ten thousand people, limited-time flash sales, free orders, price-cutting for free items, and 50% off coupons.

The scale and intensity of the event were in no way inferior to Taobao and JD.com.

at the same time.

Yanjing, a branch of Kuaidi Dache (a ride-hailing service).

Zhang Yunni from the product department was testing the upcoming "Kuaidi Dache Red Envelope" feature. After working overtime for several days in a row, she had a moment of daze and accidentally configured the new feature in the production environment.

Ten minutes later, a risk control alarm was suddenly triggered. Zhang Yunni then realized what was happening and said with a bitter face, "We're doomed!"

(End of this chapter)