Can the home assistant duopoly be broken?

It feels as though the consumer hype over home assistants sprung on us overnight. At first, we were dabbling around with Siri on our iPhones, and now, an estimated 8% of US households are in possession of an Amazon Echo speaker.
Voice search is developing at a very fast pace. In fact, it currently amounts to 1% of all digital interactions. In addition, Gartner research revealed that 30% of searches will be without a screen by 2020. This is an inevitable progression, since most people can speak u