Growth of digital assistants to generate revenue opportunities

A report from Juniper Research shows that increased use of digital assistants, such as Siri and Cortana, on smart devices will pave way for new paid search opportunities. Juniper forecasts that rapidly growing medium will generate over $12 billion of advertising spend per annum by 2021, an increase of over 3,000 per cent in comparison to the estimated spend for 2016.

Further, the report claims that besides integration into devices like smartphones and personal computers, assistants will be part of many home and automotive devices in future, creating new spaces for human-computer interaction. Improvements in artificial intelligence have led to a proliferation of programmes such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana.

"Voice assistants are a great opportunity to create more convenient ways to interact with devices," said research author James Moar. "However, they need to balance the need for accurate data with consumers' privacy needs."