Alice (virtual assistant)

[3] A special feature of Alice was the personality developed by the Yandex team together with journalist and former head of the company's marketing group Vladimir Guriev.

Based on this list, a poll was made for "Yandex.Toloka" users, the participants of which were required to determine the character traits of a girl by name.

In addition to answering questions, Alice can solve applied tasks: turn on music, set the alarm clock, call a cab or play games.

The algorithms are able to sort out accents, dialects, slangs, and Anglicisms from the database of billions of phrases spoken in different conditions, accumulated by Yandex.

For the most accurate response, Alice takes into account the history of interaction with it, the intonation of the request, previous phrases and geo-positioning.

As Mikhail Bilenko, the head of Yandex Machine Learning, told Meduza in an interview, during the early tests impertinence appeared in Alice's communication style, which surprised and amused users.

To prevent impertinence from turning into rudeness, and to limit Alice's reasoning on topics related to violence, hatred or politics, a system of filters and stop words was implemented in the voice assistant.

The first "skill" was announced by Yandex in February 2018: the voice assistant learned to order pizza from Papa John's restaurants.

In October 2017, the voice assistant Alice together with the service Flowwow in closed mode began testing the skill for flower delivery.

At the end of May at Yet Another Conference 2018, Yandex reported that thanks to its skills, Alice has learned to understand what is depicted in a photo and can recognize the make of a car, the breed of cat or dog, an unfamiliar building or monument, and is able to name a celebrity or a work of art.

Within its framework, the company planned to reward the authors of the best skills every month and pay more than a million rubles by the end of the year.

In August 2019, Tele2, together with Yandex, launched a skill for Alice that allows subscribers of any operator to find a lost phone at home or in the office for free.

[5] In mid-April 2018, Kommersant newspaper published an article about the Yandex.io hardware platform under development, designed to integrate Alice-based voice control into user electronics.

The first hardware development based on Yandex.io with built-in Alice was the Yandex.Station smart speaker, which the company presented in late May at the Yet Another Conference 2018 in Moscow.

It retained the body of the previous model, received an LED display, three-way sound with a combined power of 65 watts, and supports video in 4k.

To handle it, Alice was equipped with Yandex’s SpeechKit, which, according to word error rate, provides the highest accuracy for spoken Russian recognition.

[8] 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.