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bne September 2019 Companies & Markets I 29
Battle of the Russian voice assistants
Dasha Fomina in Moscow
We are slaves to the keyboard if we want to interact with the growing range of smart devices but being able to simply talk to a virtual assistant is the techno- logical manumission that is already a reality. It is also one area where Russia is on the cutting edge in the development race.
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 dramati- cally 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 countries that follow a differ- ent 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 expected 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 Russia’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, 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 infor- mation on the Internet, answering simple questions, provid- ing news highlights and weather forecasts, helping access functions 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.
Much of Alice’s audience comes from smartphone users, despite the fact that most devices have native digital assistants. Just like its cousins abroad, Russian virtual agent comes with Yandex. Station, the first smart speaker on the Russian market – some 40,000 of those were delivered in 2018. Yandex was also fast to launch Alice’s own ecosystem for third-party access – an open platform Yandex.Dialogs. This move encouraged companies like Papa Johns, McDonald’s, Nicorette, and
Skoda among others to make use of Conversational AI in their marketing activities and build their set of skills for Alice.
So within just two years, Yandex not only set the bar for other digital assistants but also laid the path for others: both companies and people alike are eager to embrace Conversational AI.
Oleg by Tinkoff Bank
Introduced by Russia's largest internet bank and “provider of lifestyle services”,ОOleg the digital assistant was only released in June. Sure, in many ways the new virtual agent will need to catch up to a more mature Alice, but it already doesn’t shy away from chit-chat and generally lives the concept “a friend who is always nearby”.
Created for finance and lifestyle-related tasks with a mission to help users navigate the Tinkoff ecosystem, Oleg recognizes and interprets commands, asks follow-up questions, fixes certain problems and speaks on a variety of topics.
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