In Russia, There's an AI Helper That Makes Fun of You--and It's Wildly Popular

Many in Russia, in fact, seem to prefer their AI helpers with sass and a dark sense of humor. The Moscow-based tech giant Yandex launched a Russian-speaking personal assistant called Alice this October (pictured above, sans snark). And unlike Siri or Alexa, the program relies less on scripted responses than on what it's learned by consuming conversational data mined from the Web, news articles, and even a little Russian literature. As a result, Alice can respond to a much wider range of queries. However, some of program's responses can be a bit surprising.