Yandex – Homeless.

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Alice needs a hardware home.

• Yandex has jumped on the digital assistant bandwagon but with its history, it should be able to produce by far the best product for the Russian speaking market.
• However, it will be unable to serve the majority of use cases without hardware to carry it into the home or the vehicle.
• Yandex is the pre-eminent internet company is Russia with 65% market share in search and just seen off a challenge from Uber (see here) to also become the dominant provider of ride hailing.
• Most importantly of all, Yandex has been crunching data for over 20 years, which according to RFM research (see here), is a major contributor to its RFM rating as No. 3 in AI behind Google and Baidu.
• Consequently, a digital assistant is an obvious product to launch and is one that has a much better chance of succeeding in Russia than any of the others even if they are taught to speak Russian.
• The assistant is called Alice and is the result of putting together a series of AI projects that the company has been working on for some time.
• These include voice search, weather, news, maps and so on.
• Two of the key features include:
  • First, speech recognition. Yandex claims that the assistant demonstrates near-human levels of accuracy when it comes to understanding speech.
  • This is no great feat in English anymore but in Russian, this is likely to put Yandex meaningfully in front.
  • Second, context. Alice has some short-term memory in that it remembers what the previous question was and is able to answer a follow-on question in the context of the first.
  • This is quite a difficult AI problem to solve and the only other player that I have seen do a decent job of this is Hound from SoundHound.
  • I not seen this ability in Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana or Apple Siri.
• Alice is available in the Yandex Search app on iOS and Android as well as in beta on Windows PC but this is not where it is most needed.
• Usage of voice assistants predominantly occurs when the user’s hands are occupied such as in the car or in the kitchen.
• Consequently, to address this use case Alice needs to be resident in a home speaker of some description and, potentially, in a vehicle infotainment unit.
• Yandex has stated that there will be further products forthcoming and I am pretty certain that a speaker (probably in conjunction with a known audio brand) will be shortly forthcoming.
• Given Yandex’s heritage in AI and its dominance in search, it looks unlikely that Amazon or Google will be able put up much of a challenge leaving the Russian speaking markets open for Yandex.
• It will have more difficulty if it wants to expand overseas but Russian is a big enough market for Yandex to fare pretty well just by staying at home.