Digital Assistants Advancing, but 'Voice-First' Devices Few Years Off: Report

Shipments of devices with built-in voice assistants will double to 3 billion units by 2024, said Futuresource Friday. Though the COVID-19 pandemic affected shipments in 2020, its effect on consumer purchasing was less than expected, with shipments growing 9% for the year.

Apple, Google and Baidu were the top three voice-assist platform vendors by global unit shipments in 2020, said Futuresource. Apple's Siri led with 25% share, reflecting strong sales in Apple iPhone, iPad and AirPods, said analyst Simon Forrest. Google Assistant devices were close behind at 22%, and Baidu was third with 14% on success in smart speakers and phones.

Virtual assistant technology continues to improve, but the efficacy of voice interfaces isn’t fully clear, said Forrest. “Virtual assistants promise a frictionless way to interact with products and services, yet the industry is still several years away from perfecting ‘voice first’ interfaces and may never become truly independent of screens,” he said. Voice assistants have to deliver accurate responses every time, or “consumer adoption diminishes.”

Platform vendors are working to enhance the contextual awareness of their assistants and to develop artificial intelligence capable of “surfacing precisely the right results.” They offer tools to help evaluate natural language processing models, which developers use to ensure any changes to AI models improve results and don't degrade the experience, he said. They’re also using neural network accelerators to place elements of voice engines at the edge, on devices themselves, to reduce latency and increase privacy.

Vendors are also creating lightweight voice assistants that run on small microprocessors, which could make it possible to put voice assistants into battery-operated devices, said Forrest. Voice assistants are developing beyond simple command and control mechanisms, “transforming into platforms with rudimentary conversational ability and intelligent anticipation,” said the analyst. In 2021, Futuresource expects voice platforms to be capable of “participating in conversations” and to deliver new monetization opportunities for service providers beyond harvesting data on usage behavior.

The voice assistant market is changing, with product designers considering whether the best approach is to use domain-specific assistants, said Forrest. “Domain-specific assistants promise to improve command-based interaction, since it’s easier to map the range of user intents to a limited subset of outcomes,” he said, while also expanding the number of ways users can make a request.”

Cloud-based virtual assistants, meanwhile, are becoming better at extracting complex intent from voice queries, since they harness dual benefits: flexible machine learning coupled with “massive knowledge banks.” Futuresource predicts four of five CE products sold by 2024 will have some form of virtual assistant capability.