Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Is the Wechat input method easy to use?

In September, Tencent quietly launched a separate App for Wechat keyboard (Wechat input method) and launched a test, breaking expectations about the positioning of its "Wechat plug-in". However, facts have proved that the input method is no longer a trend rider of the times, and downloading the independent input method App is a "thing of the past". Apart from a few evaluation manuscripts and promotion posts, this action is rarely mentioned.

Even, the pattern of the whole input method industry has changed unwittingly, but all this does not seem to attract much attention and discussion.

In contrast, people prefer to pay attention to live e-commerce and Luo Yonghao to discuss whether community group buying and real-time retailing can change our way of life. However, new things are not water without a source. Input method, as one of the most important applications in the Internet, has helped to expand the popularity of computers in China, and its existence has always been of great significance to the Chinese Internet.

In this paper, "New position" will briefly review several stages of the development of the input method industry, analyze the reasons and current situation of its "integration" by the operating system, and draw some regular conclusions and inspirations. for example, who will be the next industry that may disappear?

01. If the key to the Chinese Internet were not for the advent of the five-stroke input method, the development of the Chinese Internet might have lagged behind for many years. After all, there would be no "Internet" network without users.

In 1984, the sixth year of reform and opening up, the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles. Agence France-Presse's report said, "of the 7000 journalists covering the Olympic Games around the world, only the Chinese write their stories by hand."

In the 1980s, computers were difficult to popularize in China, because without proper input methods, it was difficult for most Chinese people to complete the most basic interaction between people and computers. Even when Li Yanhong went to the United States for an interview in 1992, the professor asked him, "do you have a computer in China?"

Although Pinyin input method was already available at that time, the promotion time of Pinyin invention was still short, and most of the people who had the conditions and needs to use computers had not received pinyin education. More importantly, limited by the times, the situation of Pinyin input method at that time was: single word input, a large number of homophones, no intelligent association, its input efficiency can be imagined.

Under such conditions, it is difficult for computer letters and square characters to co-exist, and an argument is popular: abolish square characters and switch to pinyin. Even, some newspapers have published newspapers with only pinyin. A transitional product, a tool that can directly associate 26 letter keyboards with square characters, was the rigid demand of that era.

Therefore, the "New position" is more inclined to follow the PC end-mobile order, the development stage of Chinese input method is as follows: five strokes-pinyin-handwriting-pronunciation. Among them, from five strokes to handwriting is the progress of the code route input method, and from pinyin to pronunciation is the progress of the phonetic code route input method, which have played a great help to the popularization and popularity of the Chinese Internet.

It was still 1984, a month after the Los Angeles Olympic Games, Wang Yongmin came to the United Nations to display the "five-stroke input method" and achieved a typing speed of more than 100 per minute. Taking Zhongguancun as the starting point, with the help of Yan Yuanchao, the five-stroke input method went to the whole country. At the same time, Harbin University of Technology set up a research group to try to connect Chinese characters with computers by taking the route of "handwriting". Unfortunately, the wide application of handwriting input method is already a mobile era.

In the 1990s, China was "connected" to the world, and the number of Internet users began to grow. At the same time, this is also a generation educated in pinyin. The threshold of Pinyin input method is far lower than the complex five-stroke input method, and it begins to become the mainstream. Technologically, it also goes from single word to phrase, to whole sentence, and finally to intelligence, intelligent ABC, intelligent spelling and other products emerge in endlessly.

Sogou did the input method in 2006, and also took the pinyin route, and then made up the Sogou five-stroke input method in 2008. From the very beginning (except the first generation of Yahoo's directory search engine), the search engine has the application demand and technology accumulation for fuzzy tone processing, drop-down keywords and other technologies on the algorithm layer, which is very close to the intelligent input method.

Ma Zhankai, the father of Sogou Input, often entered keywords in the search engine, and then copied the drop-down keywords recommended by the system to consult the data. later, he recommended to Baidu to use the search engine as an input method, which was ignored. Instead, it was Sohu and Wang Xiaochuan who gave him the opportunity.

Sogou Input occupied the market as soon as it was launched, and Tencent and Baidu quickly followed. Later, QQ Input of Tencent did the second, Baidu input method ranked third; and then Tencent strategic investment packed QQ Input into Sogou, and no one could challenge Sogou in the PC input method market for a long time since then.

In the era of PC, input method is one of the most popular and frequently called products on computer terminals. According to Meituan Wang Xing's logic of playing high frequency and low frequency, whoever has mastered the input method will master part of the discourse power of the Chinese Internet. It is precisely based on this, Sogou even spare no effort to engage in the "input method-browser-search engine" three-stage rocket to counter-attack Baidu.

The market advantage of Sogou, the subverted subverter, continues into the mobile era, the early days of smartphones. At its peak, Sogou Input's market share was more than 70%, and Baidu input method was the second in the industry, but only about 10%, which was mercilessly crushed.

But the charm of business is that it never ends, because technology is always improving. Under the advantage of technological crushing, any market is a blue sea market. Sogou, who became a dark horse by new ideas and new technologies, was finally defeated by new ideas and new technologies.

Handwriting input method is only a transitional product, but its logic does allow us to review an important principle: lower barriers to use, more direct interaction, is the direction of all product development. Keyboard input, whether it is a simplified version of the nine palace grid, or later returned to the essence of the 26 keys, than handwriting lower threshold, interaction is more direct.

The handwriting input that appeared at the same time as the five handwritten inputs did not shine on PC, but it was not until many years later that it ushered in the spring on mobile. However, the fast iteration speed of mobile devices and the rapid progress of the AI algorithm have quickly turned this route into a "misdirection", which is also related to the speed limit of handwriting. Later, Baidu input method launched the "handwriting in the air" function, which is obviously a tip of the bull's horn.

Voice input is the new way to really change the input method. Before and after 2010, the "voice-to-text" of iFLYTEK engineers entered the market with a subversive experience, this time Sogou became a follower and imitator.

According to the report of Ai Media Consulting, the top three market shares of China's mobile phone input method industry in 2021 are Baidu, Sogou and iFLYTEK, respectively, and the share gap between the first and second places continues to increase compared with 2020. Sogou was not unjustly defeated, because it did not take the lead in thinking, nor did it have any technical advantages. After all, iFLYTEK began to do Chinese pronunciation in the last century, and Baidu claimed to have invested hundreds of billions in AI.

At present, there is no professional evaluation report on the voice input method on the market, but an intuitive feeling is: some time ago, while chatting with a friend, the author was suddenly asked, "have you changed the input method?" Check the phone settings, only to find that after changing the new phone, the default is "Sogou Input xx version", and then use "voice to text" after switching to restore the previous accuracy.

Non-professional evaluation is for reference only, but we can also see the advantages and disadvantages of the speech ability of the mobile phone input method from some data:

If the use of the voice input function is as high as 86% of users under the age of 20, the proportion will gradually decline with age, and the proportion of users over 40 will drop to 52%. In Baidu input method, the proportion of users under 20 and over 40 accounted for 39% and 11%, respectively, while the corresponding data of Sogou Input were 37 and 15%.

Obviously, young people who like voice input methods have a preference, and some interesting changes are taking place in the input method industry. However, it is a pity that the input method market as a whole has "declined". To be exact, although users are still inseparable from it, its sense of existence is so low that even the upside-down of the market pattern cannot be discussed.

Against this background, Tencent announced that it wanted to do an input method in the "Wechat Open course" at the beginning of 2021, and later recalled the "foster care" QQ / Sogou Input, and this year it also launched an independent App of the Wechat input method. The answer is simple: the input method is hidden because it is integrated by the mobile operating system, and Wechat does the input method because it is more and more like an operating system.

03, the fate of being integrated is on the mobile side, simply making an input method App is no longer popular, but sometimes you have to be a part-time "scapegoat".

Many people have the experience of mentioning a product to a friend on Wechat, which is soon recommended on the e-commerce / short video platform. Who is "revealing privacy"? Zhang Xiaolong has denied it in the "Wechat Open course" and even regards this kind of user annoyance as the "original story" of Wechat as an input method.

So is the input method doing evil? After all, sometimes items mentioned in offline chat with friends will also be accurately recommended. Wechat really has nothing to do with this, and the incredible accurate recommendation to be explained by big data analysis is indeed a bit far-fetched. There is a high probability of being behind the scenes. Could it be the input method?

In fact, this suspicion is biased, because the above information is available in the phone's recording, clipboard, motion sensors and other functions, and there are countless App with these permissions. It is attributed to the unscientific input method, which is far less advanced in speech recognition in complex environments, and the phone itself does not support it to constantly call the performance of speakers and chips to monitor users.

What's more, Tencent and Baidu currently account for 90% of the mobile input market, and their profitability does not need to cross the red line to earn a meagre "lead" fee. Of course, it is also possible for big companies to "open up cloud user thesaurus data to strategic partners", which is also the consistent style of big companies.

From the perspective of profitability, the input method has indeed fallen into the abyss. For example, before being acquired by Tencent, Sogou's last independent financial report showed that search engine-related advertisements accounted for more than 90% of its revenue structure. The combined revenue of Q2, such as Sogou Input, browser and artificial intelligence, was only about $10 million in 2021.

Input method is a typical tool application, and there are only two ways to commercialize it: paid software and advertising, while the former has been proved to be a failure by the once-popular "intelligent frenzy". In the past, there was no shortage of advertising space in the input method that was called at high frequency on the PC side, but on the mobile side, due to the screen size of the mobile phone, the advertising road did not seem to work.

So what is the value of mobile phone input method? In March 2011, Ma Zhankai, the father of Sogou Input, gave his answer, "Channel value" in Zhihu. Although Ma Zhankai did not elaborate on the meaning of these four words, but combined with Sogou's later style of play, the value of this channel obviously refers to the "three-stage rocket" strategy that the mobile end has failed.

Under the separation of the isolated island of information, will current mobile Internet users give up Douyin and rush into Kuaishou in order to use the xx input method? The three-stage rocket has long been disintegrated, and the "channel value" in this sense is obviously not valid.

Without the ability to cash out and lose the channel value, mobile phone input methods step by step toward "learning martial arts, selling and operating systems". Nowadays, fewer and fewer users download independent input method App on their mobile phones. As far as the Android camp is concerned, more users will directly choose "xx input method Huawei version" or "xx input method Xiaomi version".

After being integrated by the mobile operating system, the input methods gain the installation cost and user and user data, but they lose their imagination and even the right to speak. For example, Sogou Input has not been included in the list of optional input methods included in Huawei's mobile phones, and how many Huawei users download Sogou Input App after buying mobile phones. (Sogou's speech recognition ability has been verified again)

Law and revelation in addition to the input method, more and more tool products can only be integrated or replaced by the operating system because of the lack of the above two values, and then squeeze the surplus value uniformly.

In addition to the lack of commercial value, these replaced tools are often those with low priority, users least need to switch threshold, and mobile phone manufacturers need the least operating costs, such as weather software, antivirus software, app stores, etc., such as social networking, maps and so on.

Such as Ink Weather, products with more than 100 million users for two years, and 4 million users two months after the launch of the iPhone version in 2011, are now integrated into the function page by mobile operating systems, becoming a fixed "advertising space"; and YingYongBao and Pea pods are also losing ground in front of mobile app stores.

On the contrary, social networking, Wechat is known as the "silent elephant", the status is unshakable; maps, is the mobile Internet era based on LBS services basic link, no mobile phone manufacturers dare to get their hands on. The priority, switching threshold and operating cost of these tools determine that their independence will not be challenged for the time being.

According to this logic, what is the next tool that may be hidden, integrated or replaced by the operating system? The "New position" believes that it may be the browser: in the mobile ecological background of more than 100 million independent App users, its priority is not high; there is not much data in favorites and cookie on mobile browsers, except that there is no threshold for migration except feelings; and the operating cost is not high.

Similarly, according to this logic, the prospect of the input method may not be as bad as imagined. After all, when Tencent acquired Sogou, although it said respectfully that "both the input method and the AI are very important", and the input method accounted for less than 10% of the revenue, it was the input method that was retained by the core after it was incorporated into the Tencent system.

The input method still has a certain imagination, and the status of its human-computer interaction channel is too basic and too important. Reconstructing hardware and reconstructing the way of interaction has always been the core of people's imagination about the future, and there is no more efficient way of interaction than language except brainwaves.

The essence of the Internet is connection, and the essence of computer is efficiency.

It is always more efficient to present the results directly than to provide tools. As Zhang Yiming summed up the rise of Jinri Toutiao, "when content is pushed directly in front of users, the portal is subverted." if you can input or even interact with each other, why type?

Five strokes, handwriting, pinyin, and even more detailed, Nine Palace grid, 26 keys, all represent the growth environment and interaction habits of different intergenerational user groups, and under the background of intelligence, the potential of voice input method will be further realized. In the future, there will only be more young people who forget words.

There has even been a view in the outside world that the input method itself has a chance to become the future operating system.

05. Written in the end, the next generation of operating systems will not emerge out of thin air. Wechat's ambitions are "well known". Will the input method be an important component? After all, in the Wechat input method, the "channel value" that Ma Zhankai once mentioned seems to have been carried out in another sense.

In the official introduction of the App, "smart recommendation" even comes before "voice-to-text". When this function is enabled, the input method will recommend content or links within the Wechat ecosystem based on user input. Maybe in the future, Wechat will bundle this set of input methods, open links to Mini Program services, and open them to the entire Tencent department. Who can say that it is not an operating system?

But is this model tantamount to changing the precise recommendation of privacy theft into a vest and making a public appearance? Will the user pay the bill? What about enterprises outside Tencent? Is there another 360 that dares to resist and provoke a "3Q war"?

Maybe Tencent won't do that.

Or, on the premise of sufficient time, Tencent can integrate first and then replace, gradually create an ecology, try to make a quiet transition and master this authority. But in fact, Wechat is indeed more and more like the operating system, such as Mini Program + JiuMiyagi, is it very much like an app store?

Of course, there are obviously many natural enemies along the road, and players who try to subvert the operating system through speakers / TV, VR / AR, car building and so on can be found everywhere; what's more, even in the mobile Internet ecology, there is a force that has forced Tencent's stronghold.

Before the coming of the future, no one can be sure who will be the next "input method" in the era of voice interaction.

* the problem pictures and the pictures in the article come from the network.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new position NewPosition (ID:xinlichangNP), author: Xiao L, Editor: Li Fan

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.