Yandex’s Alice Is a New Virtual Assistant For Russian-speakers!

Russian search engine Yandex presented its virtual assistant named Alice. Similarly to Siri and Alexa, Alice is well-equipped with directions, weather forecast, news, and links to other Yandex products. What’s more impressive is Alice’s abilities to do all those tasks in Russian, a language famous for its grammatical and morphological complexities. Even though Russian is one of the hardest languages for AI to deal with, the creators claim that Alice understands it with a near human-level accuracy. For example, when asked about the weather in ‘Peter’, Alice understands that the user is referring to a colloquial name for one of Russia’s major cities St. Peterburg. When asked for her name, Alice throws a nonchalant Game of Thrones joke, saying that, ‘A girl has no name’…

Yandex follows in the footsteps of other search engines, such as the Chinese tech company Baidu, by incorporating a voice-activated assistant. Alice is available through the Yandex search app for iOS and Android. A Windows version is in beta testing.