Regarding online education, what is the value of smart hardware?

Until now, online education has been an absolute outlet industry. According to the "2018-2019 China Internet Education Investment and Financing Research Report", there were 160 investments in online education in the first half of this year alone, with a financing amount of 13.1 billion.

Online education has proven to be a relatively mature market, but traditional education has been running for thousands of years. At this time, how can online education break through the problem of too closed scenes in traditional education? Where should online education go next?


Chen Jing, senior investment manager of Blue Elephant Capital, believes that the education industry has reached a critical stage of sinking and scene-oriented. In this stage of online education, online education will be further deepened, and at the same time, intelligence will gradually penetrate.


Smart hardware may be the next very important breaking point for online education. NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng pointed out earlier that intelligent hardware for education is a blue ocean that has not yet been developed.


Online education smart hardware has a fork in the road

The value of smart hardware lies in meeting the needs of users in specific scenarios and providing corresponding services. Take the smart bracelet as an example. It serves people's needs for running, step counting, reminders, and provides users with appropriate exercise, diet, and work and rest suggestions online to form a "tool + content" own ecology.


The same applies to online education. The so-called learning smart hardware, on the surface, is an auxiliary learning tool in the education scene, but if you think deeper, what needs to be included behind the learning smart hardware should be a systematic education solution.


There is much educational hardware on the market. For example, story machines and learning machines in the traditional sense. Such hardware products have certain educational functions, are universal, and have good sales, but from a technical point of view, these products are not smart hardware, let alone systemic. The educational solution too.


Learning-type intelligent hardware often has strong Internet attributes, and with the help of cutting-edge AI technology, it pursues the efficiency and focus of learning scenarios, such as NetEase Youdao scanner pen, Xiaoai Teacher, Xiaobao Vocabulary, etc.


We have selected several representatives learning smart hardware products and tried to find some rules from them.
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Most of the smart hardware products launched by Internet companies are simple and easy to use, with strong tool attributes. The smart hardware products of traditional educational institutions are more in-depth. They try to integrate the whole set of services into hardware products to make them a content export. The disadvantage is that the products are slightly complicated and seem "big and complete", but they actually don't have the right users. Focus on the pain points of learning.


This difference is precisely an opportunity for learning smart hardware today.

Learning from each other, for the online education industry, what users need is not hardware, but a complete solution, which often contains many services.


Therefore, if you want to succeed in the field of "education + smart hardware" today, it is not enough to only understand education or only hardware. Only enterprises that use products and services to meet user needs and have a deep understanding of the entire complex system can succeed.


NetEase Youdao's hardware logic

NetEase Youdao began to enter the smart hardware industry in 2017, and the first product launched was Youdao Translation Egg. New products have been continuously launched since then, and a total of eight products are currently on sale.


Youdao is a typical Internet brand. It initially entered the market with "search + translation". In 2014, it transformed into online education and gradually formed an education product system covering tools, content, and smart hardware.


Before making smart hardware, Youdao's online education was mainly based on "tools + content", such as the NetEase Youdao dictionary with more than 800 million users, and Youdao boutique courses at the content level, and so on. By substituting high-frequency tools for the output of high-quality content, Youdao has formed a unique online education system.


Starting to make smart hardware in 2017 is a bold attempt by Youdao. There are too many closed and offline links in the education industry, which has prompted the trend of the entire industry in recent years to move towards online and scene-oriented, especially the latter, where scene-oriented directly brings out the emergence of learning smart hardware.


The value of learning smart hardware for online education lies in:

1 With the maturity of technologies such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, voice interaction, and OCR image recognition, the collection capabilities of smart hardware in the physical world have been strengthened, which in turn provides more and more accurate information support for online AI technology;


2 After the hardware scale is increased, online education companies can import content through it. It is equivalent to the logic of entry, with a point-to-face all-round education output. This is also the core point of view of smart hardware + education that we mentioned above: What users need is not hardware, but a complete solution.


Previously, NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng shared similarly when reviewing Youdao's smart hardware. He believes that the hardware has the opportunity to be an entry point, and to make differentiated hardware, this kind of hardware has high bargaining power.


As far as the smart hardware of online education is concerned, thinking about service requirements and scenario requirements other than the hardware is the right answer. For example, Youdao Translation Egg is for tourism and business needs, Youdao scanner pen is for educational needs, and so on. Once the scale is up and your choice is correct, then the entrance is naturally formed.


However, most education companies now focus on the two dimensions of tools and content and are afraid to make hardware, or even if they do hardware, it is difficult to be accepted by users. In Zhou Feng's view, this is not fully taking advantage of several advantages of Internet companies: product thinking and user orientation, AI content and brand advantages, Internet marketing, and service enhancement.


Looking at learning intelligent hardware from Netease Youdao scanner pen 2.0

On August 6, at the NetEase Youdao Strategy Conference, NetEase Youdao scanner pen 2.0 was officially released. This new product has been fully upgraded in terms of function and technology.



Regarding the topic of online education sensation, products such as NetEase Youdao scanner pen 2.0 are a good case study.


Online education is scene-oriented, and the extension from the demand level is to hope that the product can be cut from a certain point to solve the pain points in the actual scene. For example, NetEase Youdao scanner pen 2.0 can solve the word search demand in offline scenes.


NetEase Youdao vice president and product leader Wu Yinghui mentioned at the new product launch that Youdao scanner pen users are not only used by elementary school students and high school students but even some college students who take postgraduate and postgraduate entrance examinations. This shows that the audience of the product is broad, which is conducive to the follow-up of Youdao launching corresponding customized content.


The reason why we regard Youdao scanner pen as a typical learning intelligent hardware is that Youdao understands what kind of hardware can better carry and highlight its advantages in "big content", and at the same time, through hardware-level problems and Demand feedback can also allow NetEase Youdao to understand the needs of students and parents from a wider user group.


This echoes our previous point of view, just knowing hardware or just knowing education is not enough, we need to add and integrate the two to think about "education + smart hardware".


Therefore, NetEase Youdao's scanner pen 2.0 does not reflect the hardware itself, but the huge online education content output and customization behind the hardware.


On the whole, Youdao does the logic of smart hardware, and the entire online education industry will most likely follow in the future. Logically, this is a scenario that can be run through. The focus is on whether the company has a set of collaboration ecology. Hardware is an entry point or entrance, and tools, content, technology, etc. are all necessary for collaboration, and it is not enough to simply do one of the links.