Alibaba Establishes Intelligent Connectivity Strategy

At the AIoT-Partnership Conference held on July 20, Alibaba announced that it has set up an Intelligence Connectivity strategy to explore more consumer-oriented artificial intelligence forms.

Throughout the last four years, Alibaba has invested more than 100 billion yuan ($14.8 billion) in technological R&D every year, and AI is one of the important directions. Previously, there has been Alibaba Cloud and intelligent information services such as DAMO Academy, Quark and UC, which mainly focus on researching cutting-edge AI technologies.

AliGenie, an interactive system developed by Alibaba, has brought users an AI experience through Tmall Genie (a smart speaker), consumer appliances, smart vehicle consoles and smart home appliances. AliGenie has now accessed 40 million households, 1,000 IoT platforms and 460 million devices.

According to Zhang Wei, the general manager of Tmall Genie AIoT, since 2019, Tmall Genie has tried to export technologies of Alibaba Cloud and DAMO Academy. In 2020, the company will continue to provide a series of business support policies to more than 10 industrial regions, such as cities in China’s Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian provinces. These efforts aim to reduce the intelligent R&D costs of small and medium-sized enterprises by more than 50% and shorten intelligent deployment and access to two weeks at the shortest.

SEE ALSO: Alibaba Opens Classes for 631 Asian Entrepreneurs

Throughout the past three years, Tmall Genie has helped core partners reduce the threshold of AI R&D from over 10 million yuan to 500,000 yuan, and shorten the R&D cycle of smart new products from eight months to two months. After three years of exploration by Tmall Genie and its partners, the compound annual growth rate of its daily active users in the AIoT Ecology has reached 61%, and the growth rate of chip module shipments has exceeded 100% for two consecutive years.