With the story of mobile Internet and smart phones achieving each other, when this round of AI wave rolls in, AI hardware has become a hot track. Not only start-ups are engaged in AI hardware, but also major factories. A few days ago, ByteDance's AI brand Doubao announced the launch of the Ola Friend intelligent body headset, and said that it is not only a device for listening to music, but also a portable jack-of-all-trades with the blessing of the Doubao model.
In fact, as early as the beginning of September, when ByteDance acquired the open-back headphone brand Oladance, there was speculation that they were ready to further expand in the field of smart audio. Returning to the Ola Friend intelligent body headset, I believe that ByteDance has learned from the experience of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses when creating this product, which is not the result of "disruptive innovation", but the product of "incremental innovation".
Weighing only 6.6 grams per ear, the Ola Friend Smart Body headphones are the thinnest and lightest headphones in their class, achieving a virtually non-sensible wearing experience, ensuring comfort for long periods of use. This is also the reason why Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can be favored by a large number of consumers, because they achieve a wearing experience that is almost the same as ordinary glasses, so they can be used daily, which is naturally easier for consumers to accept.
But just by relying on glasses, it is obviously impossible for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to achieve such a brilliant market performance, Meta's secret is to make smart glasses "useful", microphone arrays and 12 million pixel cameras allow this product to record life and chat with AI assistants. In the same way, the Ola Friend intelligent body headset is the same, with a 10mm dynamic sound driver, dynamic eq1.0, dynamic bass compensation, and directional anti-leakage design, making it first and foremost a wireless earphone with online sound quality.
On this basis, the Ola Friend intelligent body headset is connected to the Doubao model and deeply integrated with the Doubao App, which can search for information, answer questions, inspire users, and provide learning companionship and the ability to chat about any topic of interest. According to ByteDance, when wearing the Ola Friend intelligent body headset to visit museums and art galleries, users can ask it about the origin and background of exhibits and artworks, and can also act as an English sparring partner and music DJ.
Blending classic product design with cutting-edge technology, this is the hallmark of the Ola Friend Smart Body Headphones. Of course, as an "agent headset", AI capabilities are undoubtedly the key to success or failure. If the Llama 3 model behind the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses gives wings to this AI glasses, then the bean bag model behind the Ola Friend smart body headphones is not far behind.
Meta's Llama 3 is certainly the hottest open-source model at the moment, but thanks to ByteDance's advertising bombardment in the past six months, Doubao App, as a ChatGPT-like product, has become the top 50 global AI products screened by a16z, a well-known investment institution in Silicon Valley. With the Doubao App installed in the earbuds and the high-precision speech recognition model SEED-ASR, the Ola Friend intelligent body earphones can also adapt to complex use environments.
With Meta's Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and ByteDance's Ola Friend smart body headset in the back, it seems that these tech giants have found a methodology for building AI hardware. It can be clearly seen that the Ola Friend intelligent body headset and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are fundamentally different from the AI hardware products such as Rabbit R1 and Ai Pin, which became popular at the beginning of this year.
Native AI hardware such as Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 have failed, not only because of their own product power, but also because they are directly on the opposite side of smartphones. Admittedly, after the advent of smartphones, there are quite a few people calling for the next generation of general-purpose computing devices. Therefore, the developers of Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 obviously have insight into this trend and have taken a completely different "new concept of personal computing" as the selling point of their products.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that the developers of Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 are eager to subvert the traditional smartphone experience, they do not realize that the current AI models and AI agents are still immature, and the capabilities they provide are not enough to support a complete mobile ecosystem. This new form of AI hardware cannot solve a problem, that is, when consumers have Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI in their mobile phones, why should they buy a new hardware for mobile terminals?
At this stage, almost all of the most powerful products in mobile chips are born for smartphones, but the computing power of the SoC used in smartphones is not enough to support large models with sufficient parameters for inference. You don't see that almost all of the most interesting features on Apple Intelligence are provided by OpenAI, and the Galaxy AI's instant search is also implemented by Google through the cloud.
In such a situation, Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 can be perfectly replaced by smartphones, after all, what the former can do, the latter can do. Therefore, in the case of insufficient computing power of mobile SoCs, it is unlikely that new personal computing terminals will compete with AI mobile phones. Therefore, ByteDance and Meta choose to empower smart wearable devices, and Ola Friend intelligent body headphones and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are obviously complementary to AI mobile phones.
There is no direct competition with smartphones, which is the background color of Ola Friend smart body headphones and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. In fact, when the computing power of the local device is insufficient, the AI hardware can only do addition, not multiplication, and in the case of ensuring that the basic functions of the device are online, trying to use AI to tell a new story is the right way. So in the next few years, AI glasses, AI headphones, and AI watches may become popular, and products like the Rabbit R1 are destined to be short-lived.