On October 10, Yandex officially introduced Alice, a voice assistant that is supposed to kill Siri and Google Assistant. The program does not have an official human image. Personally, I see her as a sort of Uma Thurman in the form of Black Mamba!
Why aren't you Alice?
Alice's List
one. Cortana
2.Alexa
3. Siri
4. GAssistant
All the information about Alice that was given at the presentation is easiest to convey with a list of tags: voice assistant, neural networks, deep learning, understanding the context, live conversation, Scarlett Johansson.
If you are even slightly interested in IT, then you understand what the Yandex speakers were talking about.
Alice has a lot of scripted answers. This part of the assistant is perhaps the most thoughtful. The assistant refuses to maintain a conversation on political topics, loves Queen, Mushrooms, jokes about her loneliness in a small box, does not get lost when she is rude, in general, many scripts have been written. Only for some reason, many scripts are not completed to the end:
I was expecting a joke, not a send to the search ((
Often Alice does not understand what they are telling her, although she herself just said about it:
Alice understands that it was a question, but does not put question marks in the recognized text
The voice processor works well. Better than the Russian Siri, but so far worse than the WaveNet algorithm developed by DeepMind (by AlphaGO) for Google Assistant.
Yandex developers place special emphasis on Alice's personality: she can be ironic, but she is never rude (this is emphasized separately), she is correct and keeps her distance, is always ready to help, in a suitable situation she can insert an appropriate joke. The name was chosen at large focus groups so that our compatriots would only call it positive associations and not be too widespread in Russia. The fact that Yandex gave its voice assistant a female name and does not allow the user to change his gender, I think, is also due to regional characteristics.
Now, on these our Internet, screenshots of how Alice is sometimes rude, stupid, does not always understand the context or generally behaves strangely. Often, it looks funny and funny, but not always. In many ways, this, of course, is a survivor's mistake – correct it is unlikely that someone will want to post a fulfilled request in social networks. But there are also frank flaws, when what Alice seems to be able to do suddenly stops working. For example, she knows how to answer who is the director of such and such a film, but to the question: “Who is the director of the Titanic?”, She suddenly replied: “James Kemerron starred in the film Titanic”.
Well, with what, with what, but with films, everything simply has to be good, because Alice speaks in the voice of Russian dubbing Scarlett Johansson
Many reviewers wonder why ready-made cards that are in the search are not always in Alice. The product is clearly at a very early stage of development, and the fact that Yandex is so hastily removing it from beta status suggests that the company is in a great hurry. Where are they in a hurry? – hurry to have time to launch Alice before Google Assistant speaks Russian.
This strategy has its own plus: all non-tech media wrote that Yandex launched a voice assistant. Therefore, when Google Assistant speaks Russian, “ordinary people” will remember that Yandex was the first. But this also has a minus: the geeks who are trying Alice now do not understand why she does not know what the Russian Siri and the simple Google application have been able to do for a long time. Alice cannot set an alarm, write SMS, or create reminders. The only assistant function that has been added to it is opening applications, for all other requests, Alice promises to learn this soon. A very strange 'official launch', at least to teach Alice to work with Ya Mail, Ya Taxi and other Ya services Yandex developers could well.
Many reviewers attributed Alice's inability to control the phone to the fact that the developers did not have the ability to integrate their assistant into the system. What can you say here – Yandex propaganda works perfectly. We've all got the idea that Yandex is being restricted, oppressed, and offended. Dear Colleagues! Any application on Android and iOS can get any permission from the user. At Android the app can even become the device administrator if the user approves the request. Therefore, the fact that Yandex launched a voice assistant without the functions of an assistant is only a flaw in Yandex, which was in a hurry to launch. Platform holders have nothing to do with it.
During the announcement of Alice, I planned to give her a large-scale test. But in less than a day, the Internet was more than filled with screenshots of Alice's answers, reviews and comparisons. For the most part, my test results match up with the consensus opinion of the tech community: 'Alice is a good claim to be the first, but a bad claim to be a leader; we will wait for improvements. ' Therefore, I decided that the material would be much more useful to illuminate the generalization of all available results and tests. But on one of the comparisons I made, I would like to dwell separately, it touched me to the depths of my soul. As you know, Yandex has its own beautiful foundation story. Two friends of the school, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, founded Yandex in their garage. One friend was in charge of management, the other was in charge of engineering. Yandex would not have become a “Russian Google” if it were not for the programming genius of Segalovich, who was the permanent director of technology and development at Yandex until his death in 2013.
I will leave this without comment:
