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 146 million people, there are around 52 million voice assistant users in Russia, according to estimates from Just AI. Based on its figures, Yandex’s Alice (Alisa) has 45 million users, with Google Assistant on 11 million, and Apple’s Siri on 6 million. This is perhaps testament to the advantage that native Russian developers have over…