Outside the world is full of spring breeze, the scenery at home is warm and tranquil. Home is a warm swaddle and a comfortable cradle where we spend more than half of our lives.With the development of digital technology, people can use smart products anytime and anywhere, the family has become an important application scene, and the concept of smart home was born.

Compared with the traditional furniture in the home, the biggest feature of smart home is intelligence and convenience. Anywhere in the world, we can easily control the temperature in our homes. Ability to turn on and off lighting; You can also view your home via your home camera. Outside, we keep tabs on our homes with our smartphones. At home, you can easily send voice commands to a smart speaker.

At the beginning of the development of smart home, smart speaker is considered the core of smart home, it is the smart home entrance, is the tool issued by the command.In 2017, the number of brands of smart speakers reached its peak, with hundreds of companies and thousands of products competing with each other. But after the cruel baptism of the market, most of the brands to apoptosis, smart speaker into the development of the low tide. Accepted the lesson of intelligent speaker, more and more practitioners realize, intelligent speaker is not the core of intelligent home, intelligent gateway is.

Intelligent speaker is the carrier
Five years ago, Amazon announced the arrival of the smart home with the world's first smart speaker, the Echo, with its built-in voice assistant Alexa.In these 5 years, amazon smart speaker Echo has been dominant in European and American markets, leading the continuous development of smart home.May see the huge dividend of the market, countless manufacturers into the smart speaker industry, for the smart home entrance.As if occupied intelligent speaker market, can harvest the entire intelligent home industry.

When cooking dinner, you may find that the peanut oil is running out.Lying on the sofa, you suddenly want to listen to music, say to the smart speaker, it can immediately put up music, let you immersed in the world of music;Walk in the home, outside suddenly rain, say to intelligent speaker, it can help me close the window, save worry and effort.

However, these are ideal choices.Living in the home, there will be a variety of noisy scenes. Too many children interfere with the judgment of the smart speaker. The sound of TV, computer or even video outside the mobile phone will interfere with the smart speaker.

In addition, the location of the smart speaker also limits its application. The intelligent soundbox on market is all sorts of strange, many still contain a screen to be able to put video, but these cannot get rid of a difficulty, intelligent soundbox volume is huge, won't move easily, won't carry more. If placed in the living room, we close the door in the bedroom to call it, perhaps not hear. It is true that speech is the earliest and most primitive form of communication among all animals, and there are few barriers for users, even illiterate children. But the transmission of language diminishes, and we can't shout at the top of our lungs every day at home.

More troubling is the "intelligence" of smart speakers. The smart speaker is just the carrier, and the built-in voice assistant is the core of voice interaction. The most important reason why amazon Echo smart speaker can be sold well in Europe and America and assume the core role of part of smart home is the accumulation of amazon voice assistant Alexa in far-field voice recognition technology. Alexa can clearly tell the difference between commands and noise and has strong semantic comprehension, which can tell the meaning of the interlocutor.
Compared with Alexa, domestic voice assistants are much weaker.On the one hand, there is a big gap in semantic understanding and far-field speech recognition technology in China. On the other hand, Chinese is much more complex than English, and the meaning expressed in Chinese grammar will be different depending on intonation and scene, which causes great difficulty to the development of voice assistant.At present, the research direction of domestic voice assistant has shifted to voice recognition, focusing on the recognition and transmission of commands, and acting as a converter to convert voice commands into electronic commands.However, in the field of smart home, there is a device, conversion transmission capacity is much stronger than the smart speaker, it is the smart gateway.

The gateway is the core
A lot of small partners had not seen intelligent household gateway probably, different brand design is much the same, volume follows mini stereo probably, mobile power supply so big. Although it is small in size, it is very powerful. The gateway is the "brain center" of smart home devices, just like the human brain. Your limbs, language, vision, hearing and so on, and the behavior of each organ are dictated by the brain. Similarly, in the smart home system, when each sensor device wants to receive instructions and feedback data, it is transmitted by the gateway as the central command.

In the field of smart home, usually divided into perception layer, network layer, and application layer three levels. The perception layer is the skin and five senses of the smart home, which is used to identify objects, sense objects, collect information and control automatically. For example, the temperature sensor installed in the home, sensing that the indoor temperature is higher than 28 degrees, will collect information and send it to the network layer. Compared with the Internet era, communication protocols of the intelligent home Internet of things are more diverse. Bluetooth, Zigbee, WiFi, and nb-iot communication technologies exist at the same time and deliver messages to the application layer in their respective smart home networks. As for the application layer, nature is the smart light bulb, smart switch, smart TV, smart refrigerator these specific applications.

In three levels, intelligent gateway is located in the core of the network layer, intelligent home communication technology colorful diversity, there is no unified standard, the importance of intelligent gateway is highlighted. The intelligent gateway can integrate information collected from different objects and transmit them to the application layer device.In addition, the network layer needs to handle messages from outside networks.When we are outside, we will send out various commands from our smartphones to observe various scenes in our home, which are transmitted through 4G, 5G and other mobile networks. The function of intelligent gateway is to transform the external network and the home network and convert the mobile network information into Zigbee, WiFi, and nb-iot information so that the smart device in the home can "understand" and complete the corresponding work.

Smart home gateways can also work independently of human instructions. With sensors in the sensing layer, the intelligent gateway can independently transmit instructions to devices in the application layer. For example, we use the combination of gateway + human body sensor, installed in the corridor, balcony, and other space lamps and lanterns, which can be done to the lights, people go out. For another example, as for the temperature sensor mentioned above, as long as we set it in advance and perceive that the indoor temperature is higher than 28/29/30 ° c, the intelligent gateway will automatically issue a command to the air conditioner and start cooling to reduce the indoor temperature.

Compared with the intelligent speaker, the intelligent gateway has no serious defects and plays a vital role in the intelligent home network.Even smart speakers rely on smart gateways to deliver commands. In some ways, a smart speaker is more like a sense-level device, sensing our verbal commands and passing them on to an intelligent gateway. Come so, intelligent speaker resembles and human body sensor, temperature sensor is not different, it is the edge of intelligent household network only a ring, and intelligent gateway, just be that indispensable core!