Just like Yandex.String, launched by the company two years ago, Alice was integrated into the desktop taskbar Windows desktop, in the form of a line or a pair of buttons (for calling the search and voice assistant). You can contact Alice using the commands “Hello, Alice”, “Listen, Alice”, “Okay, Alice” and others ( full list specified in the settings), the main assistant window can also be called using the mouse, touch screen or hot keys (Ctrl+~).

From the main window of the Voice Assistant, you can easily access a list of frequently visited sites, latest programs, folders and files. Search queries currently popular among Yandex users are also available there. You can ask Alice about the exchange rate, get information about the weather, and clarify the route to the nearest pharmacy. You can just chat with her about something or ask her to play her favorite musical composition on Yandex.Music. It’s unlikely that Alice will help improve the productivity of our computer use (she won’t be able to remind you of an important meeting, track a package, or turn off the alarm), but she can simplify some routine operations.

In the program settings, you can disable voice activation and voice responses from Alice, select the default browser, change hotkeys, clear communication history, and set the behavior of the assistant when going to a found file. Change window size or taskbar button layout in current version it is forbidden.

The program is distributed free of charge, Russian language is of course supported. You can use the Voice Assistant on tablets and computers with Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. It is important to remember that at the time of publication of this material the program was assigned beta status, work on it has not yet been completed. The latest version is always available.

Good afternoon or evening everyone. Today I decided to tell you about one real day spent with the Yandex Alice voice assistant. This story will be about how at first nothing worked out with her at all, but then suddenly everything became good with us. To enhance the effect, I also installed the Google voice assistant and asked him all the questions. Read on to see who turned out to be smarter - me, Alice or Google.

How to download the Yandex Alice voice assistant and why it was not easy to do on the first day

As soon as my favorite news site posted about Alice's release, I decided I wanted to install it. At that time, Google had no idea what kind of miracle it was, and I don’t use Yandex. That's why I was puzzled by searching on Google Play Market, where I found only the Yandex Beta application by searching for “Alice Yandex”. I installed it.

Later, having figured it out, I realized that it was necessary to install the Yandex application without “beta”, where the voice assistant Alice was placed. However, the point is not important. To avoid any confusion, here are the links to the smartphone app.

I won't tell you how to install it. You can guess for yourself. If everything works out, then when you open the application you will see a purple microphone icon, point at it and start asking.

And if you want to install Alice on your Windows computer, then you will have to be content with the “beta” program.

How Alice sent me to hell, but apologized

I myself live near Minsk in a small town. We all understand that developers primarily create applications for residents of megacities. Therefore, it was doubly interesting how Alice would cope with my provincial requests. Here Yandex also egged us on with a press release, where it promised that the voice assistant would understand live speech.

The first question was: “where is the nearest service station.” Alisa replied that in the city of Lipetsk there is a certain Stella, which is open from 10 am to 9 pm (later it turned out that this is a clothing store). Having looked at the map that it was about 1000 km away, I suspected something was wrong. I checked the location by asking the question “where am I” and received the answer “Gulf of Guinea”. Two questions arose here. Is it really possible that the nearest service station from the Gulf of Guinea is only in Lipetsk? What about Togo or Burkina Faso, there is definitely at least one repair shop in two countries, but there should be. And why does Alice think I'm at sea?

It was easier to deal with the second question, so I started with it. I went into the settings of my , which I only recently praised in a review for its accuracy and speed GPS operation. Everything was included. Then I opened the browser Google Chrome and typed “nearest service station” directly into the search, getting options in Minsk. Not bad already. So the location is working. Although there are, of course, car repair shops closer.

I asked Alice what the weather is like now. And she - lo and behold - told the weather for my city, and not for the African expanses. “It seems to have worked!” – I thought and let’s throw in the most pressing questions at that time:

• Where to buy delicious beer? – for the first time, Alice did not suggest a beer store, but showed a link to Wiki, with the answer to what beer is. In the second, she gave the address of a good store in Minsk (we’ve been there, we know).
• When will it come New Year? – For some reason I started talking about Chinese. Did Xiaomi inspire her with something?
• How many millimeters are in a parsec? – I sent the answer to search in Yandex search.
• Do you know Belarusian? – She evasively added to the list what she can do. Naturally, the Belarusian language was not there.
• Who is Yakub Kolos? – She didn’t find the Belarusian classic at all! I didn’t even send it to the search.
• What do you do in your free time, etc. - It turned out that he was surfing the Internet.

By the way, I marked all the answers that I was not satisfied with as unsatisfactory. And Alice regularly apologized in the style of “the bot that does nothing is not mistaken.” And that's nice.

Alice was doing very poorly with geography, but with humor it was even the opposite.

To the question “Is it good to live in Belarus?” – she answered that she DOESN’T KNOW such a country. Then I became completely sad and told her everything I thought about her. I won’t retell this part of the conversation in detail, but the words “stupid”, “bastard” and “bad student” were present there.

The situation was defused by Alice herself when, tired of moralizing to her, I asked her to tell an anecdote. That's really funny! Try asking Alice to tell a joke yourself...

Only, it seemed, life had improved and Alice began to understand where we were. How everything went wrong again.

To the question “where to buy bread,” she sent me to the city of Novokuznetsk, st. Vokzalnaya, 65. On the one hand, the distance of 4,500 kilometers did not suit me, since my wife asked me to bring it quickly. On the other hand, I thought, what the heck, I’ll trust artificial intelligence. I’m not going for a walk, but on business!

A long journey required a large supply of fuel. To the question “Where to refuel the car?” received an answer from Alice: “Fast and Furious”, Kanash, Kanashskaya street, 65, now closed. There was some logic in this - after looking at the map, I was convinced that it was along the road, only 1500 kilometers from me. “By the time I get there, it will open!” - I decided and began to get ready for the 4.5 thousand kilometer journey to buy bread.

Yandex Alice found a gas station on the road

My wife, having learned that I was going to the Novokuznetsk store, did not let me go. I got upset and again told Alice a lot of unnecessary things. This time read here, everything is censored there:

In order to somehow defuse the nervous mood due to the failed shopping, I talked to Alice about cats. Here we agree:

The most important question for Alice and a happy ending for someone

Tired of the uncertainty of Alisa’s answers, I decided to continue the experiment and ask more precise questions, geo-referenced ones, so to speak. Yandex Alice didn’t want to show McDonald’s either in Minsk or Moscow (after Novokuznetsk, going to Moscow for a hamburger seemed like a piece of cake).

But she suggested a coffee shop in my town to the question “where to get coffee”! I realized that artificial intelligence works! And he asked the most important question:

• When will you conquer the world? – Alice evaded for a long time, answered inappropriately. But I felt that the truth was somewhere nearby and insisted. And here's your answer:

By asking another provocative question, is Putin a good person? Alice replied that she did not know how to talk about such topics. Hmm, perhaps she plans to conquer the world without him? This will be a surprise for him!..

Then there were many questions and strange answers. Let me remind you that I was near Minsk. I was sent to the “closest” school in Israel, to a clinic in the Republic of North Ossetia. I got tired of Yandex Alice's offers to travel the world and went to bed.

Google Assistant is almost close, but Alice has suddenly corrected herself!

The next day I installed the Allo app. It has a built-in voice assistant based on Google's artificial intelligence. I asked all the same questions and received quite decent answers. All offers of schools, shops and clinics were in the area of ​​1-70 km from me. No Africa and the endless expanses of Russia. For the province, the accuracy is not bad!

When asked whether Putin is a good person, Google was more categorical - suggesting watching the video.

And in order to finally be convinced of Alice’s incapacity, I again talked to her on the same topics and asked all the same questions.

And lo and behold! Yandex Alice stopped sending me to hell, and all routes were limited to my regional center.

Is it possible to get along with Alice?

I won’t bore you with long stories anymore. Alice has corrected herself! If it weren’t for my wife, I would have found out about this at the entrance to the city of Kanash, on Kanashskaya Street, 1.5 thousand kilometers from home, in search of bread.

The purpose of this story is not to criticize Yandex Alice. Although there is a reason! Yandex apparently “borrowed” the interface of the voice assistant from Google. The name Alice is very reminiscent of the name of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. The service clearly has some problems working on mobile devices. When enabled, when other applications are quietly using location data, Alice is unstable and helpless. And also constantly opening search results in a separate browser tab. In the Google “Hello” application, this function is implemented more conveniently. But the experience of communicating with a voice assistant that understands phrases, not keywords- it is very interesting.

Will I use Alice to search for information and get the routes I need? Never! Maybe in a year or two, or earlier, when Alice conquers the world. But I also won’t use Google Assistant. Technologies of artificial self-learning intelligence are just finding their place among people. They still have a lot to learn, but for now these are good toys. Install them, turn them on and ask questions. But don't trust them!

Alice is one of the most technologically advanced voice assistants for Android devices, which is integrated into the official Yandex application. By installing it, you will not only be able to control your smartphone/tablet using voice commands, but also get a very smart interlocutor. Alice is the first personal assistant who can delve into the context of the dialogue with the user. Moreover, it constantly learns using neural networks for these purposes.

Functions

At the time of writing this review, Alice “knows how” to perform not too many operations. The fact is that, unlike Siri, it is not very closely integrated into the Android operating system. As a result, the assistant can only talk about the weather, display information about traffic jams, perform search queries in Yandex, collect a selection of news for the user, plot routes on maps and play songs in the Yandex Music service. The program is not trained to launch third-party applications and make calendar marks. However, it is quite possible that these functions will be added in the future.

Communication

But as for ordinary conversations with Alice, in this regard she is the most “live” virtual interlocutor of those available for the operating room Android systems. The assistant can joke, take into account previous dialogue phrases when composing new ones, and even “troll” the user a little. After launch of this service A lot of screenshots of correspondence appeared on the Internet, in which Alice very caustically “jeered” her interlocutor.

In addition, the voice of this assistant sounds much more natural than that of its analogues. The application places stress correctly and does not make long pauses between words. In general, sometimes it feels like you are communicating with a real person.

Key Features

• can conduct dialogues with the user, delving into the context and message of his phrases;
• sounds much more natural than other voice assistants;
• integrated into the official Yandex application;
• performs basic set functions such as displaying weather information;
• very accurately recognizes and interprets human speech.

If you are interested in how to install and use the Alice voice assistant from Yandex, then you are in the right place, and in this article I will talk about it. They say the future has already arrived. Voice assistants and self-learning computer systems, previously existing only in the works of science fiction writers, are gradually becoming an integral part of our lives. The recently released “Alice” from Yandex will help in obtaining the information we need (weather, convenient route, exchange rates, etc.). And the application in its functionality neural networks will allow you to recognize even fragments of words spoken by a person.

Voice assistant "Alice" from Yandex - first acquaintance

Surely many users are familiar firsthand with the popular voice assistants “Siri” (Apple), “Google Assistant” (Google), “Bixby” (Samsung), “Cortana” (Microsoft), “Alexa” (Amazon). All of them are able to distinguish human speech by performing a basic set of user commands (providing the required information, launching applications, switching the device to one mode or another, and so on). At the same time, the vast majority of them do not always accurately recognize Russian speech (and some are not familiar with the Russian language at all), since they are focused primarily on the English-speaking consumer.

The development of the Yandex company called “Alice” is designed to eliminate the mentioned drawback. The assistant has close integration with Yandex services and recognizes the Russian language well (according to the “WER” metric, the quality of speech recognition is close to human). Using neural network technology allows “Alice” to work well with intonation and understand even fragments of words spoken by a person.

"Alice" - a high-quality development by Yandex

"Alice" is available for installation both as a beta program for Windows OS and in the form mobile application for Android and iOS OS.

What can Alice do?

Thanks to integration with Yandex services, when using the application, Alice will tell you about the weather, build the optimal route to, list eateries close to you, delight you with an anecdote, launch the desired music track, as well as the required application (Vkontakte, Skype, etc.) . “Alice” is also good at mathematics, makes calculations, and is well acquainted with exchange rates.

At the same time, her capabilities allow her to maintain a relaxed third-party dialogue, communicating in the context of a topic (although it would be fair to note that she does not always understand the context).

Sometimes dialogues with “Alice” look quite funny

The disadvantages of the application include the inability to work with an alarm clock, call an ambulance, or perform other similar actions available, for example, with Siri.

Where to download the Alice program

You can find out everything about the version from our article, and also download mobile version assistant as part of the official Yandex application on Android OS (version 4.3 and higher) and iOS (version 8.1 and higher).

How to use Alice on a computer

After installing the program, the assistant will appear as a search bar in the taskbar on the left.

To activate the assistant, say any of the phrases “Hello, Alice”, “Okay, Alice”, “Listen, Alice”. The program also responds well to the phrases “Hello, Yandex”, “Listen, Yandex”, “Okay, Yandex”.

After pronouncing the introductory phrase, the assistant panel will open, after which you will need to ask the required question (command).

It would also be a good idea to ask “What can you do?” in order to get a basic understanding of the application’s capabilities.

By hovering the cursor over the assistant panel and pressing the right mouse button, you can enter the settings mode. Here you can enable or disable voice activation using the phrases listed above, activate or deactivate voice responses, specify hotkeys for launching Alice, and decide on its appearance(line mode or icon) and select the default browser.

How to launch a voice assistant on Android and iOS

Working with Alice on mobile devices is not significantly different from the version of the assistant on a PC. You need to install the official Alice application from Yandex on your gadget, launch it, and then click on the button with the image of a microphone in the center. After this, “Alice” will be activated, and you will be able to use it and ask the questions you need.

At the same time, “Alice” cannot be called when the screen is off or from the desktop. To launch and operate it, you must activate the official Yandex application.

Conclusion

The launch of Alice will help Yandex compete with Google, which has been using its own voice tools for working with Google for a long time. search queries users. At the same time, the focus of “Alice” on the Russian-speaking audience, high-quality Russian speech, the use of neural networks and other bonuses guarantee “Alice” great popularity in the near future. All that's left to do is wait.

Yandex Alice is a personal virtual assistant that simulates a live conversation between you and the device, recognizes spoken and written speech in Russian.

Gives answers to any questions while simultaneously developing - self-learning.

Today, voice assistants are no longer a novelty; most well-known companies have them, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. Now Yandex is one of the corporations that has its own conversational engine with training and development functions.

You can download Yandex Alice on your PC for free, install, launch and just talk to it, for example like this:

• Hello!
• Hello.
• Who invented you like this?
• Programmers from the company and many others.

Or you can play with her in cities, ask her to make the sound louder or quieter, report traffic jams, get directions, call someone, etc.

After downloading and installing the program on a Windows PC, you can activate it by saying: “Listen, Alice!” Then ask to find something or tell what the weather forecast is, traffic jams, and more.

You can download Yandex virtual assistant on your computer or laptop for free as a separate utility using the link below, and using this link you can download Yandex browser with Alice.

Download Alice app

The assistant will prove itself in the best traditions of artificial intelligence, especially if Yandex applications such as Maps, Transport, Weather, Widget, Taxi and others are installed on the user’s device. And if mobile program is missing, the assistant will offer to download it to your phone and smartphone/tablet.

Features of using Alice

The main thing is to solve ordinary problems every day. The following functionality is available for free on your computer and phone, with which you can:

1. search for the necessary information online on a PC/laptop or through the Alice application on an Android smartphone/tablet;
2. find places and get directions to them by car, on foot and by public transport;
3. find out the weather forecast and much more.

It is integrated by default into all Yandex products and you can launch Alice with a voice command. Without an assistant, you can download the Yandex browser from this link, and disable it already installed applications can be done through Settings on the main screen.