Spurred by the news that Russian banking firm SberBank was beta testing its Visper platform for a customer-facing virtual presenter in Russia, details about the current state of voice assistants in the market has trickled out. Unsurprisingly, Yandex (the Russian Google) takes first place, but with even banks investing, it begs the question of the operators’ attitudes to the technology. With a population of some 146m people, there are around 52m voice assistant users in Russia, according to estimates from Just AI. Based on its figures, Yandex’s Alice (Alisa) has 45m users, with Google Assistant on 11m, and Apple’s Siri on 6m. This is perhaps testament to the advantage that native Russian developers have over those that don’t speak the…