Virtual Digital Assistant Software to Reach $7.7 Billion and 1 Billion Users in 2025
Tractica has published a report that estimates 2017 market size for virtual digital assistants (VDA) software was $816 million. The report also forecasts the market will reach $4 billion in 2022 and $7.7 billion in 2025 when VDA users will surpass one billion.
Tractica combines both chatbots and voice apps in its forecast to provide a holistic view of conversational software applications. From the report:
“Tractica defines a VDA as an automated software application or platform that assists humans through understanding natural language in written or spoken form and leverages some form of artificial intelligence (AI) in doing so.”
Customer Service & Marketing Biggest VDA Category
You can see from the chart above that “Customer Service & Marketing VDAs” account for the largest proportion of revenue in each year and that e-commerce grows very quickly. A breakdown of total revenue generated over the forecast period shows Customer Service & Marketing will account for 44% of spending, e-commerce is ranked second at 27.6% with Healthcare (15%), Business Applications (10%) and “Other” (3.4%) rounding out the categories.
Voicebot reached out to Tractica Principal Analyst Mark Beccue for more clarification around the breakout of use cases within Customer Service & Marketing category. He said:
For our master database forecast of AI use cases, we combined Customer Service and Marketing at this time, even though they are distinct. I did track in my working forecasts the differences. For revenues, Customer Service is much larger than marketing due to investment and potential ROI.
Beccue also added in a statement that, “advances in combining natural language processing (NLP) with other forms of AI…and other market factors have begun to expand use cases for enterprise VDAs beyond customer service and marketing.” Most of the revenue forecasts around voice focus on the revenue generated from smart speaker sales. This software forecast is a valuable addition to the corpus of market data for voice apps and chatbots.
CIRP Says 18 Million Smart Speakers Sold in Q4 2017 Bringing Installed Base to 45 Million
