On August 28, 2018, Yandex.Taxi unveiled Europe's first autonomous ride-hailing service in the tech hub of Innopolis, Russia. Today we are excited to announce that, in just two months, our self-driving cars in Innopolis have completed 1,000 autonomous rides with passengers!

A year ago, Yandex launched its intelligent assistant, Alice, equipped with advanced conversational abilities that uniquely enable users to engage in free-flowing chit-chat.  Alice was first available through our search app, connecting users with many core Yandex services to help navigate their daily routines.  Some of the original services included Search, News, Weather, and Music.  Today, 30 million people use Alice every month on multiple platforms, and the assistant has become more useful and fun through the addition of thousands of new skills.  In honor of one year in production, we wanted to share an update on Alice's growth.

At Yandex, we have had the opportunity to play a major role in the way Russian users adopt new technologies and services to better navigate their daily routines.  Our expansion into food tech is no exception.  In February, we launched the Yandex.Eats food delivery service, which connects users with restaurants in a growing number of cities across Russia.  Yandex.Eats is helping to add new and innovative ways for Russian consumers to enjoy their meals.

Today, Yandex announced the latest update for its search engine.  The “Andromeda” update has been rolled out by the Yandex search team over the last year and has included over one thousand improvements and features.  The most notable of these features are an enhanced "quick answers" functionality, along with providing users an easy way to recognize reliable sources and giving users a visual way to save searches with Yandex.Collections. 

Yandex this week unveiled two new third-party smart speakers integrated with our intelligent assistant, Alice.  The IRBIS A and DEXP Smartbox compact smart speakers will be available exclusively from two of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Russia, M.Video and DNS.  The devices will retail for 3290 rubles ($50).

Almost 20 years ago in 2000, Yandex launched its first group of services beyond search and search advertising.  In addition to news and email offerings, we introduced our first products designed to help users find goods sold online and in stores.  In 2002, we officially launched our comparison shopping platform Yandex.Market, offering books, films, cosmetics, footwear, clothing, stationery, and toys from 150 e-commerce sites.  Today, Yandex.Market serves over 20 million monthly users, offering them over 160 million goods from over 21,000 sites.

Yandex is excited to announce that we have received a license to operate our self-driving car in the state of Nevada.  With this autonomous vehicle license, we will be demoing our self-driving car on the public roads of Las Vegas during the week of CES 2019.  From Monday, January 7th until Friday, January 11th, we will be providing rides in our self-driving car for the first time outside of Russia.