Yandex Alice

https://yandex.ru/alice

Overview

Alice (Russian: Алиса (Alisa)) is a Russian intelligent personal assistant for Android, iOS and Windows operating systems developed by Yandex. Alice was officially introduced on 10 October 2017. Aside from common tasks, such as internet search or weather forecasts, it can also run applications[1] and chit-chat. Alice is also the virtual assistant used for the Yandex Station smart speaker.[2]

Development

A beta version of Alice was released in May 2017.[3] Later a neural network-based "chit-chat" engine was added allowing Russian-speaking users to have free conversations with Alice about anything.[3] Speech recognition was found to be particularly challenging for the Russian language due to its grammatical and morphological complexities. To handle it, Alice was equipped with Yandex’s SpeechKit, which, according to word error rate, provides the highest accuracy for spoken Russian recognition.[3] Alice's voice is based on that of the Russian voice actress Tatyana Shitova.[3]

Voice requests to Alice are processed by Yandex cloud servers to retain some of them with the aim of expanding Alisa's training set data. According to Denis Filippov, head of Yandex Speech Technologies, the retained voice data are completely anonymous and without any association with users' accounts.[4]