Can Alice remember the username. How to talk to Alice

• On October 10, 2017, Yandex officially launched its voice assistant “Alice”.
• “Alice” is based on neural networks that recognize speech, interpret it, compose answers and synthesize the assistant’s voice. “Alice” is trained on huge arrays of texts in order to communicate with the user on free topics.
• There are also “editorial” remarks written by the team to answer popular questions.
• One of the main difficulties in developing such a system is to understand what users will be interested in and how they will ask about it. Someone asks the search engine “where am I”, someone asks “what is my geolocation”.
• The main differences between Alice and its competitors (for example, Siri) are integration with the company’s own search system and the presence of a neural network, with the help of which the assistant independently generates new remarks.

Why Yandex took up the development of a voice assistant

By 2017, the world's largest IT companies presented their voice assistants: Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Facebook's M, and Microsoft's Cortana operate in the English-speaking market. In Asian - Duer from Baidu and Bixby from Samsung.

The company began creating Alice at the end of 2016. The service began to be developed because the entire industry is moving in this direction: the user wants and is ready to solve his problems in the form of a dialogue with a virtual assistant, the algorithms are ready for this - and you can move from voice input to a meaningful dialogue.

When the user has the opportunity to ask a question by voice, he begins to speak like a human. Instead of “Buy a driveshaft for a Lada Kalina 2007 cheap,” he asks: “Where can I buy a driveshaft for a Lada Kalina 2007?” He doesn’t invent a search query, doesn’t formulate it like he’s used to doing, but simply asks.

Both search algorithms and conversational interfaces are moving in this direction in parallel. But the voice assistant has context sensitivity - that is, the ability to retain the meaning of remarks and understand whether subsequent statements are related to them.

Let's say you asked "Alice": "What's the weather like tomorrow?" - she answered you: “+7 and that’s clear.” The next question may be: “What about on the weekends?” It is easy for a person to understand, but difficult for a machine - after all, it does not even contain the keyword “weather”. The conversational assistant can compare cues and understand that you are still talking about the weather.

Ilya Subbotin

Product Manager "Alice"

According to the developers, Yandex users already know how to access the company’s services by voice - the “Listen, Yandex” command works in “Search”, “Navigator”, and other applications. So they won’t have to get used to the new interface.

Ilya Subbotin, head of product "Alice"

From a user point of view, the project team says, with the advent of Alice, several things change. In addition to the interactive interface, the assistant has acquired a personality - “Alice” shows emotions, knows how to joke and “does not tolerate humiliating treatment.” You can now address her by name: “Listen, Alice.”

From a technological point of view, a multilayer neural network is now responsible for the assistant’s work, which learns from arrays of texts, understands the meaning of the request and independently synthesizes speech.

How does Alice work?

"Alice" is built into the Yandex search application. You can communicate with the assistant either by voice or by entering queries from the keyboard. Whenever possible, “Alice” answers the question asked directly in the dialog interface; in other cases, it shows search results for the request or the desired application.

Under the hood

“Alice” is based on neural networks: they recognize speech, analyze it, determine the topic of the dialogue, highlight information useful for searching, and synthesize the assistant’s responses.

Almost all calculations, other than voice activation (recognizing the phrase “Listen, Alice”), are carried out in the cloud. “Of course, it would be interesting to transfer part of the calculations to a smartphone so that Alice could sometimes work without the Internet,” says Ilya Subbotin. “But the computing power of smartphones is too low for such tasks.”

Machine learning technologies have reached a level where a user can simply speak to an application and see that it understands it, and the synthesized voice acquires a sound close to natural.

Alice's team

At the same time, the global scientific and technological community is only at the beginning of the journey - algorithms will continue to improve. Speech recognition, synthesis, determining the topic of conversation - all this should work even better.

There are general product metrics by which you can evaluate the assistant's performance - user satisfaction, frequency of application use. But there are also more complex parameters, explains Subbotin. For example, the ability to be in the context of a conversation: the assistant must remember what the user asked him about, be able to correctly interpret additional questions and give relevant answers.

“From the relevance of one specific dialogue in the future, it will be possible to move on to personalization and multitasking: ideally, when I’m getting ready for work, I can ask what to wear, “Alice” will look at the weather, the route to the office, decide what is the best way to get there, and Based on this, he will advise me what to wear.”

It is not yet clear how to objectively assess the system’s ability to conduct dialogue. The length of the dialogue says little about its content: the conversation can drag on if the user is interested in discussing something with the assistant or if the assistant cannot solve his problem for a long time. But a short dialogue does not always indicate a successful solution to the problem.

Focus on Search

The developers of Apple's Siri voice assistant are deliberately increasing the number of dialogue scripts so as not to show search results to the user. The Alice team does not face such a task, because Alice is a different product.

Apple doesn't do this out of abundance of choice. It's just not a search company. We are completely different. For us, search comes first - it's the best product we have.

It’s too early to guess how an assistant integrated with search will be adapted to work on other devices, says the head of the Alice product: the industry has not yet figured out which devices will be in demand among the audience, and in addition, such devices will involve different interaction scenarios, to which the system can be adapted.

“In any case, the user has a task that he wants to solve - interacting with a voice speaker or, say, a car control system. In the case of a speaker, the emphasis will probably be on music or news - and we have music and news services. In the car, the driver is interested in maps. It’s unlikely that he will ask the car: “Buy plastic windows cheap.”

Large tech companies are betting on ecosystems of smart devices - and this is expanding the possibilities of interaction with the assistant. If, to answer a question, a device without a screen needs to show search results or open an application, the assistant will be able to launch the desired service on another - for example, on a smartphone.

“It’s just a matter of adapting to the device,” continues Subbotin. But, to be honest, we don’t know anything yet. One of the industry leaders, Amazon, is still experimenting with formats: the company has an Echo speaker, a mini version of the Echo Dot, options with a camera, and with a screen.”

Personality

The developers believe that Alice’s personality is one of her main competitive advantages. Projects aimed at an English-speaking audience do not try to create a strong emotional connection with the user, but, on the contrary, rather distance themselves from him.

To give the assistant a personality, the team had to decide on the character's gender, age, name and personality traits, describe behavior, and compose lines that the assistant would use to dialogue with the user - "editorial" responses.

Together with journalist, writer and former head of the Yandex search marketing group Vladimir Guriev, the developers described the character’s character and chose suitable lines for him.

In total, the team described about 320 scenarios in which the assistant responds with editorial cues. For each of these scenarios, there are from two to seven answers, which the system selects randomly. “This is enough to form a personality, but not enough to chat about everything in the world,” says Subbotin.

The developers decided that the assistant would be a young girl who is always ready to help the owner of the smartphone, but at the same time does not allow a familiar attitude. She is correct and keeps her distance when they try to insult her, but she is not arrogant and does not boast of her knowledge.

The assistant should also be ironic and - this is important in the context of artificial intelligence systems - self-ironic. “The fact is that our speech synthesis algorithm, and all competitors’ algorithms, are not very good at emotions. “Alice” laughs at herself a little, adding the words “joke” or “sarcasm” where necessary. Because she knows to herself that she cannot yet intonate well,” the developers explain.

How the name was chosen

The team compiled a list of names that the employees felt best suited the chosen character traits. There were also technical requirements for the name: for example, it should not contain the letter “r” - small children cannot pronounce it.

In addition, the name must not be included in other words or phrases. The developers considered the name Maya as one of the options - but it could provoke recognition errors on phrases like “The Ninth of May.” It was also important that the name was not included in the list of the most popular female names in Russia - in order to reduce the number of false activations. Alice is not included in this list, but for those users who have Alice in their family, it will remain possible to activate the assistant with the “Listen, Yandex” command.

Having decided on the options, the developers, together with sociologists and Yandex analysts, compiled a survey for users of the Toloka service. In it, the company asked to determine the character traits of a girl by name. “Users can’t be asked directly which name is best for their assistant, so we asked in a clever way. They took the characteristics we needed - and, on the contrary, completely unsuitable ones, and began to ask: if a girl has such a name, is she more likely, for example, kind or aggressive?”

By a large margin, says Subbotin, the name “Alice” won the survey. “And no one during testing ever told us it was a bad name.”

How "Alice" trained during testing

In total, several tens of thousands of people took part in testing the assistant, and it lasted five months.

The main thing that we have found out during this time is that we are moving in the right direction. And that the issues that we thought users should care about actually interest them.

Before starting testing, it was important to determine the most likely interaction scenarios: the questions that users will ask “Alice”, and also to understand exactly how they will ask them.

“We understood that people were worried about, for example, the weather. Great, to talk about the weather, you need to react to something - to some user phrases,” says Subbotin. Having decided on a topic, the developers described the simplest scenarios: for example, when a user simply asks: “What is the weather now?” Then they added more complex options: weather forecast for a specific date, for several days, for several days in the next month.

Another popular topic is location determination. Initially, the Alice team collected several replicas that users could use to activate the scenario, but it turned out that people often ask questions in a completely different way than the developers might have expected. “We included: ‘where am I’, ‘where am I located’, ‘what is my location’, ‘what is my current address’. And the user asks: “Please tell me where my geolocation is.” We couldn’t have foreseen this.”

Developers monitor the types of user requests and the relevance of the assistant's responses and add new scenarios to the assistant that were not originally included in it.

The team is also developing a special dialogue model - inside the company it is called a “chatterbox” - which in the future can take over all communication with the user on abstract topics and learn new lines on its own.

"Baltalka" is trained on large arrays of texts, including dialogues. Sometimes, the creators say, they cannot predict “Alice’s” answers - they turn out to be so humane - and sometimes she can be rude to her interlocutor. But developers track incorrect replicas and remove them from the system.

The Russian company Yandex announced the development of the Alice voice assistant several months ago. But from October 10, you can officially download and install it on your smartphone running Android or iOS.

Unfortunately, there is no talk about Windows Phone yet, but given that this OS is in its last months, this is not surprising. At the same time, you can install the beta version of the application on your PC.

The project should become an analogue of Siri or Cortana, but with a Russian mentality. According to Yandex representatives, the voice assistant was named after the heroine of the film “Guests from the Future” - Alisa Selezneva.

What (who) is Yandex Alice?

The main reason why Yandex decided to develop this project (though this is my personal opinion) is the transition of users to mobile search.

Every month more and more people are searching for information on the Internet using their smartphone. And here Google is the clear leader. Yandex is not going to give up the palm of the search championship No. 1 in Russia. So he had a choice.

Despite the fact that there are already several large similar services from world leaders in the digital IT industry, Yandex managed to offer users a product adapted to our mentality. And most importantly, Alice speaks Russian very, very well, unlike Cortana. And almost no accent.

It’s also intriguing that Alice “received the voice” of Scarlett Johansson. More precisely, Tatyana Shytova, who voices the famous actress in all films with her participation.

What can he do?

The voice assistant must be “smart” enough to find the necessary information on the Internet, and “smart” enough to give an adequate answer.

1. Go to the official store.
2. Find the official Yandex application - install it.
3. Launch the application.
4. Press the "microphone" key.

After this, a chat will be displayed in which you can ask voice questions or write them using the keyboard.

Hi all! Not long ago, Yandex developers released their version of the Internet assistant - Alice, a kind of analogue of Siri, which has long been adopted by iPhone owners. Today we’ll talk about what features there are and what secrets and toys Yandex Alice can offer users. People play with her in all sorts of ways, ask awkward questions, ask her to tell a joke or find the necessary information on the Internet. In general, if you haven’t tried it yet, go to the Play Market, download and install, it’s incredibly fun and interesting, especially in the first hours of use. For those who have very little imagination, ask: “Alice, what can you do?”

In addition to the above, Alice can:

• Give an answer to the question without opening the search (If the question is clear to her).
• It will tell you the weather in your city and help you dress warmer.
• Find the right pharmacy, cafe or store nearby, get directions and find out what traffic jams are in the city.
• In the morning it will remind you of today's date and date.
• Launch an application or game on your device.
• Tell me the exchange rate.

Secrets and hidden functions of Yandex Alice

Alice has several hidden functions, as well as some abilities that can be activated. Not many people know, but you can play full-fledged games with it, and the first game we will play with it is called “What happened before.” To begin with, just say: “Alice, let’s play what happened before.” However, in this game mode, the Yandex assistant will ask you questions and offer answer options.

Game "what happened before" with Alice

Press your finger up to start the game and immediately receive the first question from the robot girl.

If the answer turns out to be incorrect, the assistant will tell the backstory and give the dates of appearance of a particular product. The gameplay is both entertaining and educational, which helps you pass time profitably. The questions are very diverse, a chair or a toaster, a nuclear icebreaker or scuba gear, a TV remote control or a cassette recorder, antibiotics or a Phillips screwdriver and others. The game round ends after every 10 questions with indicators of correct answers, after which Alice will invite you to play again. You can talk endlessly, it’s better to try to play it yourself.

Game of cities

With the voice request “Alice, let’s play cities,” you can remember your childhood and refresh your school knowledge of geography. You name the city, the assistant uses the last letter, the letters “s” and “soft sign” do not count. When the supply of cities runs out, you can always ask for help with the phrase: “Alice, give me a hint.”

More games from Alice

“I believe it or not” - you will have to rack your brain before answering the question asked.
“Let's play words” - everyone remembers this game: from one big word you have to make as many small ones as possible.
“Guess the song” - name a line from a song that the assistant will try to pick up.
“Tell about history day” - they will tell you interesting and educational or just funny and funny true facts from history.
“Guess the Actor” - you have to guess the TV star after five questions.
For lovers of mysticism and predictions, the games “Fortune telling” and “Ball of Fate” have recently appeared.
On the official website in the toys section, two more games were announced for November 24 and 25, 2017: “Save the Cosmonaut” and “Wild New World”, I wonder what the developers have prepared this time, the names are tempting and interesting.

Conclusion

I hope you have figured out what you can play with Alice from Yandex, what games she knows, someone has discovered new functions and features.
This is just the tip of the iceberg; you can read and watch in detail about all the features and functions. Perhaps some of the users were lucky enough to learn the hidden functions and secrets of the voice assistant, share with us in the comments or our group in contact and we will definitely add to our article.

Alice is a voice assistant that is installed in mobile Yandex.Browser. She will help you find the information you need on the Internet, tell you about the news and weather, turn on music, launch a program, or just chat with you on any topic.

Alice is also available in the Yandex mobile application based on Android, on Windows and in Yandex Browser for a computer.

1. How to communicate with Alice
2. Examples of queries and commands
3. Alice's training
4. Alice doesn't answer the question
5. Alice's voice activation
6. Disable Alice or voice search

How to communicate with Alice

To ask Alice something:

To end communication with Alice, click the icon in the upper left corner of the screen.

The conversation with Alice is stored on the device. To remove it, in the upper right corner of the screen, click → Clear history.

Examples of queries and commands

Alice's training

Alice is a self-learning program, she is constantly searching for suitable answers to a variety of questions. You can help Alice by marking answers with or icons:

If you clicked by mistake, click the button No, everything is fine.

Alice doesn't answer the question

To answer questions, Alice needs stable Internet access. Make sure the Internet is connected. Then check your connection, restart the program and ask again.

If the problem persists after several attempts, please contact us via the feedback form.

Alice's voice activation

Note. To save smartphone resources, voice activation is automatically disabled for the time when you go to browser settings, start a video, or type text on the virtual keyboard.

Now Alice will only be activated after you click the or icon. To the phrases “Listen, Alice” or "Listen, Yandex" Alice will stop reacting. However, it will respond to questions and commands given by voice once activated.

Good afternoon. The official release of the Alice voice assistant for smartphones took place, which made me happy, and a beta version of the assistant for Windows was also released today. I installed it, tested it a little and was just as pleasantly surprised.

Voice assistant Alice for PC

To install " Alice"on a PC, you need to go to the website https://alice.yandex.ru/windows and click on " Install“, after that the installation file will be downloaded from you. Launch and install.

ATTENTION! Yandex has removed the Alice installer; the official link now downloads a browser with built-in Alice!

I still have the installer if anyone needs it —

(screenshot)

After installation, you will see at the bottom left near the button Start search bar, on Win 10 it is integrated into the standard search, on Win7 it is placed as a separate widget. Let's look at what this assistant, which is in the Beta stage, can do now.

In the first tab, frequently visited sites and trending news or search engine queries, as I understand it:

In the second tab there is a list of programs that you can open either by clicking on the program itself with the mouse, or by asking “Voice Control” to open the application for you.

If on the main (first) tab you click on the icon “ question mark“, then you will see there a small list of what Alice can do:

For the test, I decided to ask her the latest news, to which Alice said that she was giving the floor to her colleague from “ Yandex.News“, and a male voice began to read the news.

Then I tried to talk to her, in principle she answered exactly the same as on the phone. Applications open without, websites too. If you ask her to turn on the radio or a certain song/group, then Alice opens a browser, opens Yandex.Music in it and launches what you asked her to do. She doesn't know how to work with video yet.

For PC control - it can turn the sound on and off, turn off, restart the PC, and also send it to sleep mode.

Conclusion:

What can we say? Yandex did a great job on its assistant. I hope they don’t abandon it, but continue to develop it. This is not a bad analogue of Cortana, which we are unlikely to see in Windows 10. Microsoft has been promising to release it in Russian for a long time, but so far it has fallen on deaf ears. And then Yandex and Alice just arrived.

Install, try, test.

Share in the comments what other interesting functions and “jokes” it has, what it can do and how it really helps you in your daily work with your PC.