Russia launches its own version of Amazon Alexa with 'near-human levels' of speech recognition

The Russian technology company Yandex has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called "Alice". Yandex, Russia's largest search engine, said in a press release Tuesday that Alice is the first conversational online assistant, possessing "near-human levels of speech." "We wanted Alice to interact with users more like a human, so that users don't need to adapt their requests," said Denis Filippov, head of speech technologies at Yandex. "In developing Alice, we leveraged our speech technologies, which currently provide the world's most accurate Russian language recognition. Based on word error rate (WER) measurements, Alice demonstrates near-human levels of speech recognition accuracy," Filippov added.