"Xiao Ai Tong Xue, turn on the lights." As soon as the words are spoken, a soft beam of light gently unfolds from the ceiling, like curtains swaying open in the evening breeze—neither harsh nor abrupt, but perfectly filling the entire room. This seemingly ordinary voice command conceals a quiet yet profound transformation: artificial intelligence is listening, the Internet of Things is responding, algorithms are predicting, while engineers deftly conceal all the complex technology within lampshades, chips, and code, leaving only the most natural and warmest glow.
This "unnoticed" experience is precisely the key to making technology feel warm. "We want technology to be like air—ubiquitous yet unobtrusive to life," said Zhang Weiliang, Smart Lighting Product Director at Xiaomi Group. "Take this diffuse reflection eye-protecting ceiling lamp as an example; it underwent hundreds of optical simulations and heat dissipation structure optimizations before launch. But for users, there's no need to understand what 'secondary optical design' means—they only need to experience the light."
"The initial idea for this lamp actually came from numerous user comments we received—asking if we could bring the lighting effect of large street lamps to the ceiling," Zhang Weiliang admitted. The best designers are often the users themselves; the manufacturer's task is to exceed expectations in realizing their ideas through engineering capabilities.
However, for a lamp to be truly "smart," it cannot rely solely on its own capabilities. It must be integrated into a larger intelligent system to collaborate with other devices and understand real-life scenarios. "Our goal is to weave a complete network of smart devices, enabling all ecosystem devices to connect to the platform, interconnect with each other, be capable of AI learning, and cover all life scenarios," said Sun Mingze, IoT Platform Product Director at Xiaomi Group.
Today, this network already connects over 15,000 hardware partners. However, Sun Mingze believes the real challenge lies not in "getting connected" but in "using it well." He further explained that simply interconnecting devices often results in numerous functions but unpredictable scene linkages, ultimately leaving the complexity to the user. To address this, they established unified "Thing Model Standards" and "Enterprise Interconnection Standards," abstracting devices from different manufacturers with varying implementations into standardized capabilities that the system can understand, ensuring linkages are safe, reliable, and predictable. As he stated, "Interconnection is not about making users manage more and more devices, but about ensuring that as devices proliferate, users have less to worry about."
This is not merely the exploration of a single company; it reflects the "people-oriented" development trend of the AI era. When technology becomes sufficiently "simple," it gains the potential for universal benefit. Whether for the elderly, children, or those unfamiliar with technology, everyone can enjoy the convenience and sense of security brought by technology through the most natural interactions—a word, a gesture, or even a habit.
When we discuss "making technology warm," we are essentially exploring a technological ethic and industrial direction that should resonate with national development. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, China will fully implement the "AI Plus" initiative, striving to seize the high ground in industrial AI applications and empower thousands of industries across the board. Whether it's a home that "understands you," the intelligent scheduling of urban traffic, or AI-assisted diagnostics in healthcare systems, these are all micro-level reflections of this grand blueprint in people's daily lives.
