According to
ResearchAndMarket , the global chatbot and virtual assistant market in 2019 is about $ 2 billion and is growing at 30% per year. The study examined the most popular chat bot platforms in the world, among which there are three solutions from Russian developers - DeepPavlov, Electra.AI and Just.AI.
The Laboratory of Business Solutions, based on the STI Competence Center for Artificial Intelligence MIPT, presents a rating of 50 chat bot platforms and virtual assistants in 2019. The work examined 50 tools for creating chat bots, the most widely represented in the world market. The degree of penetration of each product on the market was assessed on such grounds as the number of publications mentioning the platform, the number of public cases on its use, the frequency of references in the professional community, as well as the results of the collection of consolidated opinions of market experts who took part in the creation of this report.
All 50 platforms were evaluated by a group of experts on 7 indicators, each of which was assigned weight in importance for users developing products using the chat bot platform. The experts paid special attention to the capabilities of artificial intelligence, primarily, natural language processing, examples of the use of each platform, and industries in which the platform can find application.
As a result of ranking chatbots of platforms according to their functionality, which are reflected in the
comparative table , this rating was compiled.
Bold text indicates solutions from Russian developers.
Key Findings of the Study
- The considered platforms can be divided into two types:
- Solutions that do not require programming knowledge and contain a visual stream designer
- Developer tools without visual dialog designers
The percentage of the former is 2.3 times greater (35 platforms versus 15) than the latter. Most of the solutions released in 2017-2018 have a visual interface that is designed specifically for non-specialists. This is due to the fact that chatbots are gaining more and more popularity: this customer interaction tool is popular with consumers and helps companies save on contact centers. They are mastered even by small companies whose staff does not have developers to create their own solutions, as well as the budget for development outsourcing.
- Among the most popular and functional tools for processing natural language are IBM Watson, Amazon Lex, Microsoft LUIS, Google Dialogflow, Wit.ai, Rasa. In Russia, the oldest companies in this area are the MDGs and Nanosemantics. Also in recent years, a number of new projects using neural networks have appeared, such as DeepPavlov.AI, Electra.AI, Just AI and Chatme.AI.
- In 2-3 years, a lot of local products for developing chatbots with language specifics appeared: Recast.AI in France, Xenioo in Italy, DeepPavlov.ai, Just AI and Electra.AI in Russia, AgentBot in Argentina, Botsify in Pakistan, Engati and Morph.ai in India and others. In terms of functional content and quality, they can well compete with large international vendors, surpassing them in terms of a deeper study of linguistic and cultural features.
- One of the trends of 2019 is the growth of communities dedicated to platforms, where you can find answers to emerging questions from users of the platform or experts.
- There are signs of consolidation of this market, that is, its entry into the very initial stage of the maturation process. So, several startups were acquired by larger companies. Api.ai was acquired by Google, Semantic Machines - Microsoft, Motion.ai purchased by Hubspot, KITT.AI - Baidu, ChattyPeople - by MobileMonkey.
- Decisions vary in the degree of freedom that the developer has. So, the Imperson platform allows you to create a chatbot with a unique appearance, talking in the desired voice. In fact, such a virtual character becomes the face of the brand, reflecting its values. Creating more personalized and emotional chatbots could be one of the trends for next year.
- The vast majority of popular chatbot platforms have monitoring tools for various metrics, such as:
- The dynamics of the number of calls processed by the bot;
- dynamics of the number of users;
- Frequent topics and keywords of appeals;
- Tools for viewing failed dialogs.
“The chatbot market in the Russian Federation last year, according to various estimates, doubled, this year, according to forecasts, it will grow another three times and continue this dynamics for the next four to five years. At a global level, these technologies are also spreading at high speed. Analysts predict that next year 80% of companies will use chat bots. In 2022, in banks, interaction with customers will be 90% automated through the use of chat bots. Russia has a strong scientific school in the field of linguistic analysis and interactive artificial intelligence. This study demonstrates that domestic developments can compete with solutions from large international corporations. The activities of the Central Scientific Research Institute "Artificial Intelligence" at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology are aimed at turning Russian scientific developments into strong commercial products and fast-growing businesses, ”comments Gennady Kurkin, head of the Center.
“There are several trends that will have the most significant impact on the development of the chatbot industry in the near future. First of all, this is an increase in the proportion of combined solutions in which the robot does not completely replace human work, but supplements it in repeated routine actions. The most promising in the next couple of years will be human operators' assistants integrated with RPA (Robotic Process Automation) systems. The second trend is the development of tools for fast mining of knowledge and the construction of ontologies on unstructured data. In other words, these are systems into which a set of diverse texts can be downloaded, and they will independently select semantic connections from them and build language models specific to this particular subject area. For example, with the help of such tools it will be possible to quickly teach the chatbot for retail to distinguish between food and non-food products. The third trend is the rapid transfer of knowledge between robots. And finally, in a few years we will see an increase in the share of more personalized virtual assistants who have a unique “personality” and adapt to a specific client, ”said Ivan Bondarenko, a leading scientific developer of the business solutions laboratory based on the STI Competence Center for Artificial Intelligence at MIPT.