One bot to rule them all? Not likely, with Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft virtual assistants

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It's no wonder titans of tech are locked in an epic battle of the bots, racing furiously to produce the best virtual assistant.
Their respective help-bots - Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana - promise consumers one of the most valuable commodities in the world: free time.
Thanks to the sudden acceleration of artificial intelligence and advancements in speech recognition and big-data storage, the technology behind virtual assistants is rapidly spreading from phones to cars and homes, and the truly useful helper is approaching fast. The four giants are fighting for the biggest share of a market expected to grow to $12 billion by 2024.
"There's a tremendous amount of promise for these agents to help and assist with many different tasks that we face every day," said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research. "The more the agent can help you with, the more value it holds."
The ultimate goal is our own personal genie in a bottle that awakens with a word or touch to liberate us from all our mundane tasks, organize our days and nights, and free us from the stress of lives that have become so terribly busy. But that's not going to happen quite yet.
Today, the aid these virtual assistants provide remains limited. Most users of Google Home and Amazon Echo devices - which host Assistant and Alexa, respectively - stream music, play audio books, and control smart-home devices, according to surveys by San Francisco analytics firm VoiceLabs.
Still, the virtual agent's foundation in AI means the more it learns about a user's preferences and behaviors, the better job it can do. So while experts predict a handful of firms will dominate in this field - most agree Apple, Google and Amazon will be major players, with Microsoft in a lesser role - they're split on whether consumers will be served best by one bot, or more.
"People want one assistant, they don't want two," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research in San Jose. "You want one assistant, to be very readily available wherever you are."
However, the various assistants will likely end up somewhat specialized in their expertise, with Google's Assistant, for example, excelling in providing knowledge and managing schedules, and Microsoft's Cortana leading on gaming, said VoiceLabs CEO Adam Marchick. In a few years, many people will use two or three different assistants, Marchick predicted.