CES 2025, themed "Dive in", is in full swing, and AI is still the most deserving highlight of the exhibition. And unlike in the past, artificial intelligence's eye-catching moments are not only in laboratories, but also in the colorful commercial market.
In his speech at CES 2025, Huang Renxun repeatedly mentioned that AI will evolve to a deeper level; Qualcomm emphasized the trend of edge AI and launched innovative achievements of AI in the fields of PC, automobile, smart home, etc.; TCL announced that its overseas flagship TV series will be connected to Google AI Gemini; Thunderbird Innovation released AI shooting glasses at CES, equipped with Alibaba Cloud Tongyi series large models...
Tuya Smart, the world's leading cloud developer platform, also took "AI Dive In" as the exhibition theme, and displayed AI headphones, AI ear picks, hummingbird feeders, AI pet feeders, AI fantasy lighting, AI dolls, AI grippers and other AI hardware and new AI development platforms, which not only demonstrated Tuya Smart's integrated hardware and software solutions in the field of AI, but also indicated that the extensive personal device and smart home market is ushering in a more advanced AI transformation wave.
01 The opportunity to create AI blockbuster products has arrived
10 years ago, AlphaGo defeated professional Go players Lee Sedol and Ke Jie in succession. AI's performance in board games was impressive, but such applications are not widely used by ordinary people.
Two years ago, Vincent's large model ChatGPT quickly gained millions of users upon its launch. By September 2024, the product had 11 million paying users, generating more than $200 million in revenue for its parent company OpenAI each month. This means that AI software applications have become blockbuster products.
Since last year, we have seen more opportunities for AI hardware.
Mainly because: in recent years, large model products have been continuously optimized and upgraded; lightweight small models have been widely trained and adopted in end-side scenarios; generative AI produces higher-quality content based on large and small models more deeply; traditional business giants and emerging startups have increased their investment and publicity in AI, which has significantly improved consumers' acceptance of AI functions... All of these have accelerated the arrival of the era of AI hardware commercialization.
For example, in 2024, AI dolls began to show commercial feasibility because they hit the demands of children's education, children's or adults' emotional companionship, etc. AI dolls have higher technical content, added value and customer unit price than ordinary dolls, which attracted a group of leading companies to rush in and at the same time promoted the industry to quickly gain consumer attention. According to research institutions, the global AI doll market size will exceed US$30 billion by 2030.
Based on this, Tuya launched an AI doll development solution. The dolls developed based on this solution can understand children's emotions and intentions, and meet children's needs for voice chat, interactive entertainment, and obtaining popular science knowledge.
In terms of enriching AI doll functions and accelerating product launch, based on the self-developed "AI intelligent body brain", Tuya provides customers with a one-stop delivery solution for AI dolls without development (they can choose the finished product solution, AI Box solution or only motherboard solution independently), supporting multiple large model platforms and supporting Tuya ecological device control.
In just a few years, the shipment volume of smart health devices has exploded. According to iResearch data, the scale of China's smart sports and health market is expected to exceed 82 billion yuan in 2025, with a compound growth rate of about 46% from 2021 to 2025. However, the traditional "recording + analysis" sports and fitness method is not interesting, and it is difficult to cope with the boredom that will arise from long-term exercise. Interactive AI capabilities can help make up for this shortcoming.
Based on the existing gamified sports solutions, Tuya Smart has equipped sports and fitness auxiliary products (such as grippers) with the "AI Fitness Refueling Elf" function. In addition to simple chat interactions, when users have not exercised for a long time, the "elf" will encourage users to continue exercising.
For example, in the field of pet economy, consumers' demand for pet products is developing from basic food security to diversified directions such as health monitoring and entertainment companionship.
Therefore, after embedding the pet AI applet provided by Tuya Smart, pet smart devices with camera functions (such as pet smart feeders) have the functions of pet file creation with multi-pet recognition, smart feeding settings, identification of abnormal pet behavior, online AI consultation, automatic generation of short videos, etc., which accurately meet the needs of pet owners and make the product more attractive.
In general, the logical basis for creating an AI hit product is that the product meets human needs. At present, safety needs, comfort needs, entertainment needs, health needs, and privacy needs are all high-frequency words, among which there are rigid needs and elastic needs.
The charm of adding AI to traditional products lies in increasing added value and promoting consumers to convert demand into purchasing power.
02 Tuya Smart clears obstacles for AI hardware development
Faced with the ever-changing technological development and complex and ever-changing market demands, in addition to discovering business opportunities earlier than competitors, the more critical thing is to bring products to market faster and iterate them to maturity.
Obviously, it is difficult for most terminal companies to quickly complete all aspects of AI hardware from project establishment to launch on their own. Working hand in hand with leading partners in the industry has become a key path for many companies to create AI hot products.
Recently, Tuya Smart unveiled its newly upgraded AI development platform at CES to help customers develop efficiently and provide customers with an integrated solution of "basic AI capabilities + other partners' AI capabilities + hardware development capabilities", which attracted many professional audiences to stop and learn.
1. In terms of basic AI capabilities, Tuya has fully mastered the KnowHow of multiple smart hardware industries, and has made general capabilities including natural language recognition (NLP), emotion recognition, data prediction, etc. based on different scenarios. Developers can directly use these capabilities without repeated development.
2. In terms of partner AI capabilities, Tuya has established partnerships with global advanced big models such as Doubao, Tongyi Qianwen, Kimi, Yuanbao, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Amazon Nova, etc. Developers can use Tuya module products integrated with advanced big models to connect their own hardware to AI big models and achieve a leap in product performance.
3. In terms of hardware development capabilities, this has been Tuya's advantage for many years. Tuya Smart provides a cloud developer platform for smart device and industry developers to solve a series of problems such as long smart hardware development links, inconsistent equipment and system standards, difficult interconnection, and device security, helping developers improve development efficiency and focus their main efforts on product differentiation and value enhancement.
Currently, Tuya supports more than 40 AI capabilities in 8 major application scenarios for mainstream AI hardware, including energy-saving management, environmental control, communication and collaboration, home life, audio and video analysis, health and sports, entertainment education, convenient travel and other core areas.
In addition, in addition to providing a hard-core AI hardware development platform, Tuya Smart has rich customer service experience and a wide range of smart hardware ecosystems.
As of the end of September 2024, Tuya Cloud Developer Platform has attracted more than 1.26 million registered developers in more than 200 countries and regions around the world, covering different types of scene applications such as home, real estate, hotel, industry and agriculture.
In terms of market and channel expansion, Tuya Smart can also provide support to customers based on its global resources.
03 AI Era: Join Hands to Create the Future
At this moment, AI glasses, one of the AI hardware categories, has attracted wide attention at CES. The "Hundred Mirrors War" is about to start, and 2025 can also be called the first year of AI glasses commercialization. However, AI glasses are just a microcosm of the AI hardware market with vigorous vitality, and everything can be AI just around the corner.
According to the forecast data of research institution Canalys, the global generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) market size will grow fivefold in the next five years, from US$14.6 billion in the initial stage in 2024 to US$72.8 billion in 2029.
Just as the theme concept of Tuya Smart in this CES: Walking with AI, wisdom and everything. We are standing in front of unprecedented opportunities, and look forward to working together to create a brilliant new chapter in the AI era!
This paper is from Ulink Media, Shenzhen, China, the organizer of IOTE EXPO (IoT Expo in China)
