• Apple’s Siri holds 25% market share while Google Assistant holds 22%  and Baidu with 14%.
• Market shipments to double to 3b units in 2024.
• Four out of every five consumer electronics products sold will exhibit some form of virtual assistant capability by 2024.

Apple, Google and Baidu emerged as the top three virtual assistants platform vendors by unit shipments last year as the market continues to exhibit robust performance, propelled by enhancements in the underlying technologies along with increasing penetration across consumer electronics.

Apple’s Siri holds 25 per cent share worldwide, reflecting strong sales in Apple iPhone, iPad and Airpods.The newly announced AirPods Max will expand Siri’s opportunity further in 2021.

Google Assistant holds 22 per cent share, primarily due to its integration in Android smartphones and tablets, but also now illustrating moderate growth in the wearables category.

Baidu holds 14 per cent market share overall, driven by its success in smart speakers and smartphones. The company made moves into hearables, launching XiaoduPods late in 2020 and a further collaboration with Huawei promises to widen its market opportunity in 2021.

According to Futuresource Consulting, the impact of Covid-19 dampened virtual assistants shipments throughout 2020.

Vendors raising awareness

However, the effect of lockdowns on consumer purchasing was less pronounced than anticipated, and 2020 saw a nine per cent increase in shipment volumes overall.

Shipments of products with built-in voice assistant technology will double to 3 billion units in 2024.

Simon Forrest, Principal Technology Analyst at Futuresource Consulting, said that voice control has established itself as an essential feature across consumer electronics.

 “The audio processing aspects of virtual assistants have largely matured, and focus has shifted towards improving assistant competency and optimising language models. As such, innovation now lies squarely in the hands of the technology giants with knowhow in artificial intelligence,” he said.

Although virtual assistant technology is continually improving, the gains are becoming harder to quantity and questions are being raised around the efficacy of voice interfaces.

Moreover, he said that 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.

“Virtual assistants must deliver accurate responses each and every time, otherwise consumer adoption diminishes. So, platform vendors are working to enhance the contextual awareness of their VAs and develop AI capable of surfacing precisely the right results,” he said.

Voice engines at the edge

Furthermore, he said that platform vendors are moving swiftly to utilise neural network accelerators (NNAs) to place many elements of voice engines at the edge, on devices themselves, to reduce latency and increase privacy. Prime examples of this include the Honghu AI chip jointly developed by Huawei and Baidu, and Amazon’s AZ1 Neural Edge processor, allowing voice algorithms to execute on the device itself, starting with an all-neural speech recognition model that handles requests locally.

“Vendors are creating lightweight VA solutions that can run even on small microprocessors, extending the opportunity to place voice into battery-operated devices,” Forrest said.

Virtual Assistants are developing beyond simple command and control mechanisms, transforming into platforms with rudimentary conversational ability and intelligent anticipation, he said and added that  VA platforms will become capable of participating in conversations and deliver new monetisation opportunities for service providers beyond harvesting data on usage behaviours this year.

Conversely, he said that cloud-based virtual assistants are steadily becoming better at extracting complex intent from voice queries, since they harness the dual benefits of flexible machine learning coupled with massive knowledge banks.

Futuresource predicts that four out of every five consumer electronics products sold will exhibit some form of virtual assistant capability by 2024.