A survey conducted by the marketing company Ovum makes a bold prediction: by 2021 devices with virtual assistants will exceed the number of people on Earth.

Her by Spike Jonze.

A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with his newly-purchased operating system that's designed to meet his every need.

"Globally, embedded digital assistants will exceed 7.5 billion active devices by 2021," the company concludes based on data from the past few years. The report also lists specific figures for the coming years: Google Assistant, with an estimated share of 23.3%, followed by Samsung Bixby with 14.5% and Apple Siri (13.1%), Amazon Alexa (3.9%), Microsoft Cortana 2.3%. The company does not include Chinese digital personal assistants ​but predicts that their base will be close to 1.2 billion in four years. The survey commented that while Alexa and Google have captured the US market, Apple's Siri have relatively equally distributed base around the world, and in this sense, the platform seems to receive the largest recognition​ in the coming years.

As far as the devices in which the digital assistants are present, a change is also expected. After the smartphones and tablets, ​they are mainly aimed at entering TVs and smart devices in smart homes. - Source