Yandex introduced voice assistant Alice

Yesterday, the Russian company Yandex officiallyintroduced the world of her voice assistant created by the name of Alice, which harmoniously fits into a number of existing voice assistants, such as Siri, Cortana and others. Alice today can solve a wide range of everyday tasks. For example, telling the weather, choosing places where you can quickly have a bite to eat, looking for answers to user questions on the Internet and much more. But the most pleasant difference between Alice and many other assistants is that she is not limited to a set of questions predefined in her and is able to improvise.

For developers from Yandex it was very importantteach Alice to understand the natural human language that we all speak to each other, as well as teach her how to deftly get out of many non-standard situations not provided, for example, in the same Siri. That is how the world's first voice assistant was born, not limited to a set of any predefined patterns. Alice easily copes with driving directions, tells the latest news, manages the media library on your smartphone and, of course, skillfully searches for the information you need on the Web.

What is most interesting when creating a syntheticAlice’s voices were used samples of the voice of Russian actress Tatyana Shitova. It was she who voiced artificial intelligence, originally voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s film “She.” She voiced the sorceress Yennifer in the video game “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt”. At the moment, Alice's virtual assistant is available in the Yandex application for the iOS and Android platforms. A beta version of the assistant was also released for Windows, but in the future we are promised to expand the list of platforms into which the assistant will be integrated.