Smart Assistants in Russia

At the end of April, SberDevices opened beta testing of the Visper platform to create a virtual presenter which can read a text like a live speaker. Against the background of developing smart assistants, there is a trend of developing voice assistants beyond the voice only approach, that means developing voice assistants not limited only to voice interface.

According to Just AI’s estimates, in 2020 the number of users of voice assistants in Russia amounted to 52 million users. The most popular assistants in the country are Alice (45 million users), Google Assistant (11 million) and Siri (6 million). Part of the audience use several solutions at once. The Just AI survey among smartphone users showed that more and more people use smart assistants: in 2019 71% of respondents have interacted with such services, and in 2020 this figure reached 77%. Every day in Russia in 2020 32% of respondents used voice assistants against 29% in 2019.

The demand for smart speakers in Russia is also increasing. Sales of speakers with a voice assistant increased sevenfold in a year’s time. According to M.Video-Eldorado’s estimates, in January-July 2020, the vast majority of sales accrued to devices with Alice. In March Yandex announced that it had sold over 1.3 million speakers with its voice assistant in the three years since launch. Nevertheless, smart speakers have not yet become the main channel of interaction between a person and a smart assistant. The Mail.ru Group claims that smartphones are the leading category of devices with voice assistants.

Natural language processing (NLP) is the fourth largest area of ​​work in Russia in the field of artificial intelligence (AI): according to the creators of the “Artificial Intelligence map of Russia“ (as of April 29, 2021), 52 companies out of approximately 480 work in this area. The top 15 Russian companies who are developing NLP are Yandex, Speech Technology Center, ABBYY, Mail.ru Group, Just AI, Tinkoff, Sberbank, etc.

Another trend of the industry is the opening of platforms for third-party developers to create new skills of smart assistants, in other words, focusing on a model somewhat similar to the open source principle. Based on this model, Alice’s skills, Sber’s smartapps (applications which allows to promote goods and services on smart devices with a built-in Salut voice assistants) and Marusya’s skills are created. Experts see this model as similar to writing apps inside the App Store and Google Play, and predict that over time this area will gather pace and the mechanisms for creating skills will become simpler. But at the same time, they do not unequivocally claim that the industry will develop exactly according to this scenario.