After self-driving cars and smart speakers, Russian search engine giant Yandex is getting into smartphones. Its debut handset, fittingly titled "Yandex.Phone," is an entry-level Android device that's hooked up to its massive ecosystem. That essentially means it comes pre-loaded with Yandex's software -- including its GPS, music, and weather apps. At the center of it all sits Alice: the company's virtual assistant, which now boasts 34,000 localized skills and can understand Russian with a "near human-level accuracy." Alice can also help you find local businesses and service providers from Yandex's integrated business directory.

Russia isn't going to sit on the sidelines while American companies like Amazon and Google conquer the smart speaker world. Search giant Yandex has launched the Yandex.Station, billed both as Russia's first smart speaker and the company's first hardware product. The device uses Yandex's in-house voice assistant, Alice, to handle upwards of 4,000 skills like checking traffic, ordering pizza or finding flights. However, its real specialty is video -- it's an unusual bridge between audio-only speakers and smart displays. The Yandex.Station has an HDMI output that lets you stream videos directly to your TV, whether it's from Yandex's own KinoPoisk or alternatives like Ivi and Amediateka.

Russian search giant Yandex has unveiled its virtual assistant Alice. Like Alexa or Siri, Alice provides users with directions, weather forecasts and news as well as incorporating access to other Yandex offerings like its music service. And, of course, it does all of this in Russian, which Yandex points out isn't an easy language for AI to tackle. "Speech recognition is especially challenging for the Russian language due to its grammatical and morphological complexities," Yandex it said in a statement. "According to word error rate measurements, SpeechKit provides world-best accuracy for spoken Russian recognition, enabling Alice to understand speech with a near human-level accuracy."