Marvin & Co: Why Does MTS Need Its Own Voice Assistant?
Guest — Arkady Sandler, Head of the MTS Artificial Intelligence CenterMarvin. His Inner World and Character
Kirill Petrov, Managing Director of Just AI: Arkady, as we know, MTS recently launched its voice assistant Marvin. Why did MTS decide to get into voice assistants in the first place?
Arkady Sandler: MTS today has moved far beyond telecom. Over the past year, the company has clearly recognized itself as an ecosystem. We have a wide variety of products and services: MTS encompasses finance, banking, and more modern fintech. MTS is media: we have music, books, and television. It is a large number of digital products (I probably couldn't even list them all). In short, we are present in many areas of our customers' lives. And the number of customers who use not just one but a bundle of services is growing very rapidly.
It was perfectly logical for MTS to pursue the path of unifying this user experience. There are very simple things here, like creating a single ID so that it's much easier for users to enter the ecosystem (we already have a unique user identifier — the phone number). But we also started to glue this ecosystem together, to bind the user experience through other channels. For example, the most popular app in the segment is called My MTS. It's a typical ecosystem app — I'm not afraid to call it a storefront — where you can browse services and content. But that's a text-and-graphic format. And then there are voice interfaces, and this area is developing very rapidly worldwide, as we know. That's actually how you and I first met — in this field.
Voice interfaces and voice assistants are becoming an increasingly popular topic. If we look at markets outside Russia, the penetration of conversational interfaces there is even higher than ours. But ours is not small either. So it's quite logical that for a business ecosystem, a virtual assistant is becoming the new normal. And we decided to follow this norm and create our own virtual assistant that would bind the ecosystem experience together, serving as a companion for our customers across different channels and interaction environments.
K.P.: You said "our customers" several times. Does that mean Marvin is available exclusively to MTS customers?
A.S.: No, even now, at the very start, a customer of any carrier can download and use Marvin completely freely. From that moment on, the person becomes our customer — if they haven't already been using any other MTS service. Which is pretty hard for me to believe, because there are so many MTS services and so many people who use them. So when I say "our customer," I don't specifically mean MTS Telecom, MTS Mobile, or MTS Home — I mean an MTS customer in general.
K.P.: Speaking of competitors in the general assistants market (these are the well-known Alice from Yandex and Marusya from Mail.Ru Group), what are Marvin's differences and advantages?
A.S.: Well, we have a particular approach, a vision of how Marvin should develop, and I think this approach will bear fruit. I wouldn't want to reveal everything publicly. I think the general skills (meaning skills like information search, weather forecasts, alarms, etc. — ed. note) that Marvin also has will be supported by all assistants. So competition will most likely be built not on general topics but in other areas. And here we have our own bet.
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