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30 I Companies & Markets bne September 2019
But most importantly, Oleg is 100% home-grown – yes,
a banking institution has built an AI-powered voice assistant from scratch. Since 2014, Tinkoff has been developing deep neural network models and voice technologies as part of its AI First strategy. The company also boasts its speech recogni- tion technology with an accuracy rate of 95%, which works even in a sound-polluted environment. Besides, Tinkoff has its own biometric system, which works 99.99% of the time, and its own voice synthesis technology, based on WaveNet, Tacotron and Deep Voice neural models.
At the moment of launching, Oleg's skills comprised transferring money to Tinkoff Bank and Sberbank accounts, making restaurant reservations, booking beauty appointments, searching for discounts, purchasing movie tickets, offering money advice and life-hacks, managing credit cards, changing personal information and much more. In the future, Tinkoff is planning to further integrate Oleg into its ecosystem, which spans travel, mobile, investment, insurance, and entertainment services.
To use the assistant now, one needs to launch the Tinkoff app, which might to a certain extent hinder its adoption. Still, the company is addressing that by making most of Oleg’s functionality is available in a hands-free mode.
So while Oleg is a relatively young digital assistant, it already has a competitive edge, that’ll take others great effort to surpass. Being able to identify a user's voice using biometric data and offering services where security is key, it can provide a smooth experience for customers without the perils of multi-step authorization.
Marusya by Mail.ru Group
In June leading Russian tech company and Yandex’s main rival, Mail.ru Group tech holding, owner of Russia's two most popular social networks Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, announced it was beta-testing its very own voice assistant Marusya.
One can participate in the testing by leaving a request on the project’s website or getting an invite from other participants. The beta version of this app is available on the AppStore and Google Play.
As of now, Marusya answers questions about the weather forecast, movie showtimes, and train tickets, puts on music and radio, and perform various other tasks. Mail.ru Group has not yet announced the launch date, but it says in the future, the assistant will be able to talk about news, order food and call a taxi.
While Marusya at this stage is a “dark horse” of Russia’s voice assistant market, for Mail.ru it can really become an excellent business opportunity for business growth. Unlike Yandex and Tinkoff, Mail.ru Group has the user base of both Odnoklassniki and VKontakte – Russia’s two most popular social networks and are more popular than Instagram and
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Facebook. A major part of their audience is young and pro- gressive, so the company can organically drive it to Marusya.
What will come out of this?
As the new digital assistants emerged, the Russian internet exploded with the videos of the three talking to each other, sometimes not in a particularly friendly manner. Russians are clearly excited about Oleg and Marusya. However,
the two newcomers will have to struggle to snatch the leadership from Alice, which is basically a one-stop-shop for all things Yandex.
A more mature Alice exists on a variety of devices, includ- ing Yandex.Station, computers, smartphones, headphones and children’s watches, so this is something others will need to address. And if Tinkoff with its self-sufficient ecosystem might do fine without one, Mail.ru Group needs to consider a smart speaker release following Marusya.
In its forecast, Deloitte noted that by the end of 2019,
the number of voice-activated smart speakers will exceed 250mn devices. And analysing the dynamics of the industry, the forecast is to reach a billion devices sold already in
2023 worldwide.
Besides Yandex is most likely eyeing another growing trend: smart displays where something like Yandex.Station can con- nect to a TV via the HDMI port. Will Mail.ru Group also jump in on that, considering the amount of entertaining content it potentially has access to? We will have to wait and see.
When it comes to games and entertainment, Mail.ru Group is sitting on a goldmine – all of those can be transformed into conversational interfaces, attracting huge advertising traffic, especially once payment mechanics are implemented.
The payment functionality within voice skills allows you to monetize a voice assistant and develop the ecosystem around it, increasing its appeal to third-party developers. For example, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa have implemented a model similar to the App Store and Google Play – with a proportion of revenue sharing from in-skill purchasing (purchase within the skill) in the ratio of 70% to 30%, where 70% of the income goes to the developer.
So far, Marusya is tied only to Mail.ru's own services, but the company has already promised to open an ecosystem of skills for third-party developers.
While the problem of “skill discovery” is still a major one for most digital assistants, Yandex’s Alice included, with direct access to millions of social network users who are easily segmented, Mail.ru Group can be the one to solve it.
As for Oleg, its user base already consists of the bank’s clients whose personalities have been officially verified. Voice recognition technology helps process around one million calls, while a biometric system, trained on customer voice