Zuckerberg, who aggressively launched the "strongest surface" holographic AR glasses, stayed on the hot search for several days, giving Meta a temporary lead in the fierce "AI hardware battle".
The holographic AR glasses Orion, which cost $5 billion and a single machine cost of up to $10000, serves as a powerful tool for Zuckerberg's "metaverse+AI" map, opening up the imaginative space for AI hardware implementation.
In fact, wearable devices have been exploring for several years, and this round of AI boom has truly touched the technological artery of the industry. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said, "The popularization of AI technology will profoundly change the way we live and work, and headphones and smart glasses will become two key areas of AI hardware
Wang Song, CTO of Future Intelligence, told 21st Century Business Herald reporters that all companies that layout AI headphones or intelligent hardware tracks are essentially betting on the opportunity for the next generation of human-computer interaction transformation. I believe that before there are breakthroughs in batteries and chips, mobile phones will still be the most important computing platform, but there are also functions that mobile phones cannot achieve, which is an opportunity left for wearable AI hardware
Billion dollar market
Mark Weiser (the father of ubiquitous computing) proposed in 1999 that the most influential technologies are those that can integrate into the details of life. For chip based information technology, he believes that Wearable Devices are the inevitable path for personal computing devices.
There are three industry standards for the ultimate answer to Wearable Devices, namely the ease of accessing the device, the ability to compress and transmit information, and weight.
Guided by these three standards and the Mark Weiser philosophy, the industry collectively believes that perhaps headphones and glasses are the most promising prototypes of Wearable Devices, with the former being lightweight and the latter having higher information density.
Wang Song told 21st Century Business Herald reporters that the future development of wearable AI hardware will focus on intelligent interaction and virtual assistants, personalization and scene adaptability, miniaturization and lightweight design, long-term battery life and energy efficiency optimization, data security and privacy protection, and other aspects.
Intelligent interaction and virtual assistants mean that interactive methods such as voice assistants, gesture control, and eye tracking will be further enhanced on wearable devices, allowing users to interact naturally with the devices without the need for physical operations. This will significantly improve the usability of the device and enable AI virtual assistants to better integrate into daily life and work.
Personalization and scene adaptability refer to AI endowing wearable devices with stronger adaptive capabilities, enabling real-time adjustments based on user preferences, behavior patterns, and usage scenarios. For example, smart glasses adjust display modes according to changes in lighting, smart headphones can automatically adjust noise cancellation intensity, etc. Smart wearable devices will have multimodal sensor integration, which can perceive and understand user behavior, physiological signals, and environmental changes, and make intelligent adjustments.
Wearable devices require higher comfort and wearability, therefore, hardware miniaturization and lightweighting are the core goals for future development. By using new materials and integrating more efficient chips, future wearable AI hardware will become lighter and thinner, reducing the burden on users.
Battery life has always been one of the pain points for wearable devices. With the continuous increase of AI applications, more efficient battery technology and low-power chips need to be developed in the future to ensure that the device's battery life is extended without sacrificing functionality, and to ensure that users can enjoy the powerful functions and convenient experience brought by the device 24 hours a day without interruption.
In addition, due to the large amount of personal privacy data involved in wearable devices, data security and privacy protection will be the focus of future development. Wang Song believes that devices need to be equipped with stronger encryption and authentication technologies to ensure the security of user data.
In fact, the Orion released by Meta this time also reflects these application directions. Meta claims that Orion is a "masterpiece of miniaturization" with component sizes reduced to the millimeter level. In the future, Meta hopes to improve AR display effects, make vision clearer, optimize thinner and lighter designs, and strive for mass production to reduce the price of AR glasses.
In terms of AI functionality, Orion has built-in contextual AI that can "perceive and understand" the external world, "predict and actively meet" the wearer's needs.
For example, Orion can generate recipes based on captured images of ingredients, act as a simultaneous interpreter for real-time conversations, and complete QR code payments without having to pull out your phone.
In addition to these examples, the 'Meta AI' personal assistant will continue to iterate through subsequent updates.
According to Verified Market Research's forecast, the AI hardware market is expected to reach $474.1 billion by 2030, with an average annual growth rate of 38.73%. This indicates that the demand for AI hardware will demonstrate strong growth momentum in multiple fields, particularly in the consumer electronics and health industries.
In addition to Meta, domestic and foreign companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Thunderbird are also continuously making efforts in the field of AI glasses, trying to take the lead in winning the city.
Worth being redone by AI
AI headphones are also a popular track that is not inferior to AI glasses.
The functions of AI headphones often include AI noise reduction, speech recognition and summarization, real-time translation, etc.
Qualcomm's "Hybrid AI White Paper" points out that in edge AI terminals, compared to mobile phones and speakers, the portability advantage of headphones is prominent, and it may become the fastest developing edge AI terminal at the current stage, and is expected to eventually become an independent intelligent assistant that can be used anytime, anywhere.
How could Zhang Shuo, founder of AI native hardware company Wanwu Technology and former venture capitalist, believe that the current market opportunity for AI headphones is greater than that for AI glasses.
In the domestic market, competition for AI earphones has already begun.
Future Intelligence, Sound Intelligence Technology, Philips, Cleer, Meizu, and Smart Connect Plaud have already launched their own products in the race of AI earphones.
In the Internet factory, ByteDance has not given up the hardware layout. It is said that the AI hardware team of ByteDance is developing an AI headset product that is deeply integrated with the Doubao big model and the Doubao App.
Hammer Technology founder Luo Yonghao and former Meizu CMO Li Nan founded Nu Meow Technology, which is rumored to also launch smart headphone products.
According to the 21st Century Business Herald reporter, iFLYTEK AI earphones have raised the accuracy rate of dictation to 98% in recording and transcription. In real-time translation and simultaneous interpreting, iFLYTEK supports the translation and transcription of 32 languages, 12 dialects, 10 industry terms and 2 national languages. The Viaim AI built into the earphones can serve as a "meeting assistant", intelligently analyzing recorded meeting content and generating summaries with just one click. It can also become a "task manager", generating to-do lists based on meeting content.
The AI multilingual acoustic earphones of Shengzhi Technology are equipped with an AI assistant that can respond to user instructions in real time, achieve functions such as transcription, translation, and content generation. They can also provide health data detection, sleep aid audio, and reminders for daily life needs for sports and health. This AI headset ranked first in the sales volume, sales volume and popularity of goods in the Tiktok 3C video category, and Tiktok sold 100000 units in a single store.
As an excellent carrier of artificial intelligence, AI audio devices are being reshaped. After a simple iteration beyond the functional level, it also marks that headphones are gradually evolving from simple audio playback devices to intelligent terminals with more functionality.
But as of now, AI earphones have not yet reached the stage of being "truly intelligent agents".
Wang Song believes that a true smart earphone must be a device that can independently connect to the internet and perform independent calculations, and can be used even without a mobile phone.
To achieve such an independent state, the hardware and software challenges faced by headphones are very obvious, such as limited computing power and battery life due to size constraints; In terms of software, how to make headphones break through current limitations and support one click direct access to more complex commands also needs to be updated and modified.
The combination of AI glasses and AI headphones is also a hybrid technology direction.
In May of this year, it was revealed that Meta was developing AI earphones equipped with cameras, hoping that these earphones could be used for object recognition and foreign language translation. The design and timeline of the project have not yet been finalized.
Wang Song introduced that currently, some research is being conducted within the future intelligent system, such as enabling headphones to detect the surrounding environment in real time, including where they are and who are around them. There are many similar explorations within the future intelligence, but due to the limited capabilities of current large models, it is difficult to achieve 100% accuracy and quickly push similar functions online, "he said.