Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge
Chinese search giant Baidu is now the world’s second biggest vendor of smart speakers, according to a new report from Canalys. The research firm says Baidu overtook Google to capture 17.3 percent of the global market with 4.5 million shipments in the second quarter of 2019, representing staggering year-on-year growth of 3,700 percent. Amazon remains the overall leader with more than 25 percent share of the market and 6.6 million shipments.
Baidu’s AI speakers run on an AI platform called DuerOS. The company initially targeted the high end of the market with the Teenage Engineering-designed Raven H speaker (above), but that product apparently sold poorly. More recently, Baidu has pushed sales of much less expensive models, with the basic…