Last fall we launched our intelligent assistant Alice, providing the Russian market with an assistant equipped with high-quality conversational abilities and advanced understanding of context. We were especially excited to provide users with this unique interactive feature and we were humbled by the overwhelming positive feedback we received. Today Alice engages in tens of millions of interactions every day to millions of daily active users.
While we have been thrilled to see the adoption (plus all our users’ funny memes and screenshots), we were also eager to keep Alice on track in advancing its development as a centralized tool that integrates multiple useful services, which started with Search, Weather, News, Maps, Transport, and Music. Over the course of Alice’s first six months in production, we introduced several new features and capabilities to provide users with even more assistance. We shared those updates to our Russian users as they happened but wanted to provide a recap to our English audience before we enter the next phase of development and expand Alice’s capabilities even further:
- Integration with Yandex.Navigator: Alice is now helping drivers stay safer on the roads through integration with Yandex.Navigator, Yandex’s navigation system that serves over 18 million drivers every month. With the help of Alice and advanced speech technologies, drivers can ask Alice to help provide routes to destinations, locate the nearest gas station, and find open parking spots among other features. While Yandex.Navigator previously handled specific voice commands, the integration with Alice has enhanced the service to offer more natural interaction on relevant navigation topics.
- Integration with Yandex.Taxi: Through integration with our market-leading Yandex.Taxi app, Alice can also help book taxi orders by checking the address or name of the desired organization and then launching the Yandex.Taxi order page with all relevant information. After a user makes the request, he or she just needs to hit the order button once Alice has loaded all relevant information.
- Interactive Games: Alice offers users a chance to test their knowledge and entertain themselves with over 16 interactive games. Alice’s games help challenge users with their knowledge of various topics through trivia style games such as This day in history, Guess the Animal, and Fact or Fiction.
- Integration with Yandex Browser for desktop: Through integration with Yandex Browser, Alice offers users a new way to interact with their computer through voice. In addition to other standard functions offered through mobile, Alice provides assistance with operations in both the browser and the computer. Alice can help open a favorite YouTube channel, play a song and change the volume in addition to other options such as launching Word or shutting down the computer.
- Math and currency conversions: Alice helps users quickly solve their advanced banking and math questions through voice commands. Alice computes math questions in addition to helping with currency conversions.
- Timer and Alarm: Alice helps users stay on schedule with the timer and alarm functions that are integrated into Android. Whether it is setting a timer while cooking or a reminder, Alice users can simply ask Alice to help them stay organized.
As part of this process to expand Alice’s capabilities and ecosystem even further, we introduced a beta version of Yandex.Dialogues, which provides developers the opportunity to develop new skills for Alice. We believe that some of the best products come from collaboration and diversity and we look forward to Alice’s growth through this initiative. We are excited to share more news on the development of Alice in the coming future!