Alice (virtual assistant)

Alice (Алиса (Alisa)) is a Russian intelligent personal assistant for Android, iOS and Windows operating systems and Yandex's own devices developed by Yandex. Alice was officially introduced on 10 October 2017. Aside from common tasks, such as internet search or weather forecasts, it can also run applications and chit-chat. Alice is also the virtual assistant used for the Yandex Station smart speaker. The development of Alice began at the end of 2016, when the IT market was trending toward the development of virtual assistants: the market already had Siri from Apple, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Cortana from Microsoft. At that time, Yandex had already implemented voice control in Search, Navigator, and other applications, and was busy creating a voice assistant capable of interacting with humans in a meaningful dialogue - a fundamentally more complex system that uses a multilayer neural network. The official launch of Alice was announced on October 10, 2017: the assistant appeared in the Yandex search app for Android and iOS and a beta version of the voice assistant for Microsoft Windows. According to Yandex statistics published in May 2018, Alice is installed in 53% of smartphones in Russia and is available in the navigator in more than 20 million cars. 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. It was decided that the voice assistant would be a young, ironic girl, ready to help the owner of a smartphone. The voice of "Alice" was dubbing actress Tatiana Shitova, who voiced most of Scarlett Johansson's characters and the voice of OS1, who called herself "Samantha", in the Russian dubbing of Spike Jonze's "Her". Choosing a name for the voice assistant went through several stages. First, a list of requirements was formed: the name should not contain the letter "er", which is not pronounced by small children, and the name should not be part of common phrases.