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September 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
Development of 5G networks has been heavily discussed in Russia lately, but specifics are yet to be worked out. In particular, it's not yet
Battle of the Russian voice assistants
The global virtual assistant market is booming: Juniper Research expects “nearly 8bn digital voice assistants to be in use by 2023,” while Strategy Analytics is predicting that by that time the share of smartphones with voice assistants will grow to 90%. Smart speaker adoption rate also rose dramatically by March 2019: according to Voicebot.ai, 26.2% of the US adult population own a smart speaker.
And while the US and Europe are dominated
by Amazon, Google and Apple, there are coun- tries that follow a different path. Tech-savvy and progressive, they make the most of their local knowledge and innovate. Among such countries is China, whose smart speaker installed base is ex- pected to rise to 59.9mn in 2019, Japan, which is predicted to quadruple its smart speaker market size to US $38bn by 2025 and Russia, where the monthly audience of Yandex’s home-grown voice assistant Alice surpassed 30mn.
June of 2019 was particularly rich in events for Russia’s voice assistant market. For the past two years, charismatic voice assistant Alice by Rus- sia’s tech giant Yandex set the tone leaving behind local instalments of Siri and Google Assistant. But things are about to change with the launch
of Tinkoff Bank’s voice assistant Oleg and the announcement made by Mail.ru Group, which is beta-testing its very own Marusya. So, together with Kirill Petrov of Just AI, we’ll break down the curious case of Russia’s AI market.
Alice by Yandex
In its home country, Yandex is like Google, Amazon, and Uber all wrapped in one. In 2017,
known if 5G will be developed by a consortium of existing operators or a designated operator will be created.
the company launched Alice the voice assistant to organically intertwine with its ecosystem of country-wide services that comprises, a search engine, food delivery service, car sharing, and much much more.
According to the figures released by Yandex, Alice is now used by some 35mn people monthly. Available in Russian, Alice can do all the things one would expect from a digital voice assistant like searching for information on the Internet, answering simple questions, providing news high- lights and weather forecast, helping access func- tions around your phone and entertaining content, and acting like a chit-chat bot.
This chit-chat feature paired with Alice’s distinctive character and quirky sense of humour is the key to the voice assistant’s growing popularity. Soon after its release, Alice went
viral on Russian social media with screenshots of funny dialogues and videos of people talking to it. Alice memes and people trying to uncover its hidden skills on Youtube may not seem
like much, but they encouraged people to use smart assistants and disrupted the way people communicated with them.
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