In a new report released by measurement firm Verto Analytics, it was seen that Siri continues to dominate the virtual assistant space by still being the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million Monthly Active Users in the United States. However, a decline of 15 percent was noted in the number of monthly users as compared to last year. Moreover, it was also found that user engagement with Siri, Apple’s AI, also went down from 21 percent to 11 percent last year.
On the other hand, Amazon’s Alexa continues to skyrocket from obscurity to dominance and has taken a massive jump of 325 percent in monthly active users.
The AI now has 2.6 million monthly users- a massive increase from just 0.8 million in the last year. Apart from that the platforms user engagement also rose from 10 percent to 22 percent during the same time frame.
Samsung’s S-Voice loses popularity along with Siri
The report from Verto bases its findings on data gathered from more than 20,000 American consumers. This data was collected between May 2016 - May 2017. Similar to most behavioral firms, the information was collected from a statistically representative group which noted that they monitored their usage. This information was then combined with Verto’s consumer survey data, which explained the factors of user sentiment and behavior is a better way.
The analysts use the data mentioned above to determine when and who is using what personal assistant and what the user engagement is like. In this report, the user engagement was defined as a “stickiness” factor, which compares the daily users to monthly users. It was found during the study that phone-based personal assistants such as Samsung’s S-Voice and Siri see a decline in popularity, whereas virtual assistants with voice computing such as Google Home’s mobile application and Amazon’s Alexa see a growth in popularity.
Top three apps used after using virtual assistant
Other than reading into user engagement, Verto also delved into which applications were mostly used instantly after deploying the virtual assistant. This was done to understand why people are frequently turning to AIs. It is presumed that assistant apps are often employed to find websites or apps.
It was found that Google Maps, Play Store, and Chrome were the top 3 apps that were consulted after using an AI. Other than these three Google-owned apps, the other applications that made it to the list were Safari, Messages, and Facebook.
