Google set to dominate Apple, Amazon and Samsung in the race for the best voice assistant

The concept of virtual assistance has been in consumers' mind for more than half a century, first introduced through Sci-Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) featuring virtual assistant HAL and infamous quote "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Portrayed as a must-have feature by the consumer tech industry, our research at Ovum shows that digital assistants, in fact, fall short of consumer expectations and can't do what they want. A survey conducted by Ovum in the UK and the US in May 2017 revealed that more than 50 percent of consumers don't find digital assistants useful (see Figure 1). The digital assistant population will equal today's human population in 2021. Instead, Google Assistant will dominate the native (i.e.