US Top-5 tech companies vs. Chinese Top-5 tech companies – human-machine interface technologies

In public debate, big tech companies are often portrayed as a uniform bloc and given an attractive acronym. This obscures the fact that these companies often have very different technological foci. Here we look at human-machine interface technologies, a set of particularly important technologies whose development in the coming years will play a decisive role in determining how we interact with increasingly intelligent machines and systems.

Overall, the US big tech companies, led by Microsoft and Apple, are leading the way in most technologies according to their world-class patents. From a Chinese perspective, Tencent is ahead in most techologies, followed by Huawei and Baidu. In most cases, however, they lag significantly behind their US competitors.

Apple accounts for 18% of all world-class patents in gesture recognition worldwide. This is the highest figure, followed by Microsoft with 12%. Tencent leads in human behaviour recognition with around 16%, well ahead of Baidu with 2.5%. Microsoft leads in eye tracking with around 11%, ahead of Apple (7%) and Meta (5%).

Alphabet has the broadest portfolio with a lot of activity in all technologies, while Meta, for example, has a clear metaverse focus with eye tracking, gesture recognition and avatars. Alibaba and Xiaomi have the smallest shares.

It is also striking that these 10 companies account for 43% of all world-class patents in gesture recognition and around one-third each in speech recognition and eye tracking.

Overall, the US Big Techs are the leaders in 9 of the 10 human-machine interface technologies, while the Chinese Big Tech companies are still in the mid-single-digit percentage range. The exception is Human Behaviour Recognition, where the five Chinese Big Techs account for 20% of the world-class patents and the US Big Techs only 4%. In Speech Recognition, the Chinese Big Techs reach 10%, but still far behind the US Big Techs with 24%.

In the coming weeks, we will continue this series on topics such as mobility (including autonomous driving, smart traffic), or advanced digitalisation (including GenAI, quantum computing, big data, cloud computing)

Technology Profiles

The profiles show all human-machine-interface technologies per company. Please choose company from the drop down menu. The profile shows the technological activities as world shares held by the company in each technology. World share is defined as the share of company world class patents in total global patents in a technology. A bubble position at the top shows a high world share (vertical axis). The horizontal axis shows the dynamics of the technology as the change in world market share in recent years. Bubbles on the right side are very dynamic.