Virtual Assistant Technology - Statistics & Facts

Popular virtual assistants

Although the technology has been available in simple forms for years, Apple’s Siri was perhaps the first to be both highly advanced and commercially available. Seeing the success of Apple’s product, tech giants like Google (Google Assistant), Amazon (Alexa), and Microsoft (Cortana) released virtual assistants of their own. Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi have also bring to the market their own virtual assistant products, with the Baidu DuerOS and the Xiaomi Xiao AI as notable examples. Consumers are making use of these technologies in their homes, cars, and in connection with a vast range of other smart devices such as smartphones and smart speakers.

Smart speakers help popularize the use of virtual assistants

Although virtual assistant was introduced to the consumers by smartphones, it is via smart speakers that it becomes more widely used. Since the release of Amazon Echo in 2014, smart speakers have made their way into the households - as of 2020, a third of U.S. and UK households own at least one smart speaker. Inbuilt with virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant, smart speakers can perform tasks such as checking the weather and playing songs on-demand, and in smart home households, commanding other smart devices. With a projected worldwide installed base of more than 600 million units by 2024, smart speakers will continue to gain popularity in the future, bringing virtual assistants into more households.

Business adoption of virtual assistants

Everyday consumers are not the only ones with positive attitudes towards such devices. Business buyers also find voice assistants useful and are planning on increase the use of voice technology in the near future. Leading business use cases of voice technology include subtitling and closed captioning, as well as customer experience and analytics. Among leading benefits that organizations experienced from adopting voice assistants were reduction in customer service costs, man-hours saved daily and a reduction in customer churn.

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