Virtual Assistants: A Decade in Review

Virtual Assistants: A Decade in Review

It all started in early 2010 when Apple purchased an app called Siri and soon after launched the voice assistant on iPhones – catapulting the popularity of voice AI and normalizing virtual assistants for the masses. Soon after Siri, the world was introduced to the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana – making voice AI part of the everyday fabric of digital life. Yet in the 10 years since its adoption by the mainstream, companies are still struggling to evolve their voice AI offerings to be more conversational. For the better part of the 2010s, companies like Clinc have taken the concepts introduced by Apple and morphed them into more complex, “human-in-the-room” offerings that companies around the world are using to delight customers and simplify the complex and nuances interactions of doing business.

According to Gartner, in 2020 customers are expected to manage 85 percent of their relationships with enterprise businesses without interacting with a human. In fact, AI is projected to grow to more than $11 billion by 2023. That’s good news for AI companies like Clinc.

It’s an exciting time to be leading the charge in advancing the field of AI. And if that’s not enough proof that AI is primed for exponential growth in the next decade, consider this – venture funding for companies tied to AI is expected to top $8.7 billion in 2019 alone. And, the number of virtual assistants is forecasted to exceed the current population by 2021. 

“The year 2020 will be an exciting time for conversational artificial intelligence (AI), as chatbots join forces with other digital assistants and integrate deeper into back-end technologies to deliver better user experiences and increase productivity,” Andy Peart with Forbes predicts.

So what does Clinc see as the future of AI heading into a new decade? For us, it’s all about making conversational AI better. We want to deliver experiences that exceed users’ expectations by having AI that can understand messy human language and context – a true “human-in-the-room” experience. As the field continues to evolve, Clinc will be leading the way.

To learn more about how Clinc is innovating in the field of conversational AI, check out our research.