Kroger Teams with Alibaba in First International Venture

Big news.   Getting Kroger's premium private label into China. Will there bean exchange of technology as well?   See Alibaba's Tmall effort.

Kroger teams with Amazon rival Alibaba to sell groceries in China
By Alexander Coolidge, Cincinnati Enquirer

In a bold move against Amazon, Kroger is teaming with internet giant Alibaba to sell groceries in China.

The move will be the Cincinnati-based supermarket chain's first-ever international venture and focus on selling dietary supplements and private label goods, including natural and organic foods. Kroger characterized the venture as a "pilot" that will showcase its house brands.

"E-commerce enables Kroger to quickly scale to reach new customers and markets where we don't operate physical stores, starting with China," said Yael Cosset, Kroger's chief digital officer. 

Kroger's products will appear on Alibaba's Tmall Global platform, China's largest business-to-consumer marketplace. Launched in 2014, Tmall targets China consumers who want premium products. The platform provides brands and retailers without operations in China to build virtual storefronts and ship products into China.  ... " 

Alibaba Builds Echo for China

Apparently only in Mandarin for now.  Continued competition in this space.

Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
By Lulu Yilun Chen  in Bloomberg

Tencent, Baidu also developing their own home assistants

The Tmall Genie will sell for 499 yuan during its trial period

The competition in digital speaker-assistants is getting more intense, as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. unfurled an Amazon Echo-like device and fellow Chinese internet giants Tencent and Baidu prepare to develop their own.

Alibaba’s “Tmall Genie X1” will go for 499 yuan ($73) to the first 1,000 people during a one-month trial, coming in below Apple’s $349 HomePod and the roughly $180 Echo. Its biggest competitor, Tencent Holdings Ltd., is developing a voice-activated digital speaker that could hit the market within months, Tencent President Martin Lau said in a May interview. And on Wednesday, Baidu Inc. showed off its own “DuerOS” personal assistant..... 

Powered by the AliGenie system .... " 

More including pictures in BBC.  This also includes a video of the related Baidu Duer system called 'Little Fish'.

Index of my Coverage on Assistants.

More on Kroger and Alibaba

More and expert comments on this.   Also notice the assistant augmented Tmall platform, testing for US application?  Large CPG's now getting private label competition from abroad in new markets?

Kroger teams with Alibaba to sell private labels to half-a-billion Chinese consumers
Who doesn’t want to access a billion-plus people who are much further along on the digital adoption journey than the U.S.?

by George Anderson in Retailwire

Kroger is looking to make its first overseas move a big one. America’s largest operator of supermarkets announced yesterday that it will test an online store selling its private label goods in China using Alibaba’s Tmall platform.

The pilot program will initially test sales of Kroger’s Simple Truth natural and organic private label. Last year, sales of Simple Truth products exceeded $2 billion, making it the largest natural and organic brand in the U.S., according to Kroger. Simple Truth is the second largest label in Kroger’s private brands portfolio. .... " 

China Infuses the Corner Store with AI

Of interest, a move ahead in China that should be watched.

China's AI-infused corner store of the future  in Axios

China’s take-no-prisoners Big Tech war is playing out in An Huang's little family grocery in Hangzhou, a three-hour drive southwest of Shanghai.

What’s going on: A year ago, Huang and his father had a visit from representatives of Alibaba, China's e-commerce giant. What did they think of transforming their dowdy place into a state-of-the-art, digitalized store, with all the bells and whistles, under Alibaba’s Tmall brand? According to Huang, it took him and his father only about five minutes to agree.

Today, as he stocks up on popular beer and snacks for the World Cup rush, he told Axios that revenue is up 30% in his spruced-up shop, equipped with artificial intelligence-backed apps and even a heat sensor to track foot traffic.

Why it matters: Alibaba says that over the last year, it has redone about 1 million mom and pop shops like the Huangs' across China. It has done the same with about a hundred superstores. Big and small, these outlets buy all their goods through Alibaba's platform and pay using its affiliate Alipay app. ... " 

Intelligent Personal Assistants

At today's CSIG meeting Jim Spohrer pointed us to the growth of the intelligent personal assistant,  aka VDA,  and that the Wikipedia article on the topic had a good list and links to work under underway.   The article contains much more.   The idea continues to grow.   Items marked with a * have been covered here.  Here is the list:

(This post is NOW continually updated with new links, hundreds of posts)

*Accenture's MyWizard'
*Accenture's Amelia
*Alibaba Tmall Genie
*Alibaba using AliGenie 
Braina
*Microsoft's 'Cortana'
*Microsoft's 'Invoke'  With Harman-Kardon Using Cortana
*Microsoft Home Hub
*Enterra Aila
*Amazon Echo
*Amazon Show   Amazon Echo with screen
*Google's 'Google Now'
HTC's 'Hidi'
Maluuba Inc's 'Maluuba'
*Cognitive Code's 'SILVIA'
*Cisco's Spark Conferencing Assistant
*Apple's 'Siri'
*Apple's HomePod
*IBM Watson Analytics
*IBM Watson Assistant
*Wolfram Finance
*Wolfram Alpha
Nuance's 'Vlingo'
*Samsung's 'S Voice'
*Samsung's Otto
*Samsung's Bixby  (S8 Phone Assistant)
*BlackBerry's 'BlackBerry Assistant'
*LG's 'Voice Mate'
*LG's Hub Robot
*Baidu's Duer.
*Baidu's Little Fish
*Pepper Retail Robot by Softbank
* Facebook M
*Mattel Aristotle by Nabi  (Baby Monitor)
*Jill Watson  - TA at Ga Tech
*Mycroft
*Kasisto Financial Assistant
*Kuri by Bosch
*Ginger by Intel  (unknown since its acquisition)
*Otto by Samsung
*Viv by Viv Labs
*Google Home   by Google
*Google Assistant by Google
*DingDong by LingLong
*Einstein by Salesforce (links to current collaboration with Oracle?)
*Project Evo by Microsoft
*Connie by Hilton/IBM
*Smart Assistant by Lenovo
*SoundHound for Hyundai
*Essential Home


See also Virtual Personal Assistants.  In Wikipedia.

Alibaba and AI

More from China on their process

Why Alibaba is betting big on AI chips and quantum computing
Meet the man behind Alibaba’s gamble on emerging tech.   by Yiting Sun

During the opening ceremony of Alibaba’s 2018 computing conference last week, Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, invited the MC to taste some tea on the stage—but, first, to distinguish between tea roasted by hand and by machine.

While the MC stared helplessly at two saucers filled with nearly identical-looking tea leaves, Hu pulled out his smartphone. He took a photo of each saucer and fed them into an app developed by Tmall, one of Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. Using an algorithm specially trained to tell the difference between different kinds of tea leave, the app solved the problem.

It was a small example of the interplay between Alibaba’s research on fundamental technologies and the demands of its business. Later on in the four-day conference, the company announced more plans to develop technologies that could be turned into useful things in everyday life, including an AI-chip subsidiary called Pingtou Ge and a team that’s developing a quantum processor.

The person leading all these research efforts is Jeff Zhang, Alibaba’s chief technology officer and head of its DAMO Academy research lab. Zhang sat down with MIT Technology Review at the event to discuss his company’s plans. ... "

Cortana Voicebots in China

In Voicebot.

Xiaomi has launched a new Microsoft Cortana powered smart speaker called Yeelight Voice Assistant. 

The Yeelight product line is known in China for smart home products and includes smart lighting that integrates Cortana for voice control. Yeelight Voice Assistant looks identical to an Echo Dot and will start shipping in China in late January. This is not Xiomi’s first smart speaker. The company launched the Xiaomi Mi AI smart speaker in July. That product was priced at just 299 Yuan or about US$45 but did not list Cortana integration.

The price for the Yeelight Voice Assistant is listed as 199 Yuan or just over US$30 at today’s exchange rate. That puts the pricing at about the level that Amazon Echo Dots and Google Home Mini’s were selling during the holiday season, but 40% less than their list price. More important for Xiaomi today is that it is much less than the US$99 cost of the Alibaba Tmall Genie and the US$256 Raven H from Baidu. There is a model of the LingLong DingDong from JD.com that is listed at 199 Yuan so Yeelight will not have the low end of the market entirely to itself. What all of this shows us is that the Chinese smart speaker market has quickly become even more dynamic and competitive than the U.S. market. .... "