Russia launches its own version of Amazon Alexa with ‘near-human levels’ of speech recognition
Yandex claims that ‘Alice’ is first conversational intelligent assistant.
By David Reid
The Russian technology company Yandex has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called “Alice”.
Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, says that Alice is the first conversational online assistant, possessing “near-human levels of speech.”
“We wanted Alice to interact with users more like a human, so that users don’t need to adapt their requests,” said Denis Filippov, head of speech technologies at Yandex.
“In developing Alice, we leveraged our speech technologies, which currently provide the world’s most accurate Russian language recognition. Based on word error rate (WER) measurements, Alice demonstrates near-human levels of speech recognition accuracy,” Filippov added.
Yandex claimed in a blog post Tuesday that the digital assistant’s advanced level of context allows users to carry out a more relaxed style of conversation.
“For instance, when a user asks Alice, ‘What’s the weather in Moscow?’ and then follows with a question in slang asking, ‘And what about Peter?’, Alice understands the intent and provides the weather forecast for St. Petersburg,” the post read.