Yandex Blog

This year, Yet another Conference (YaC), our annual corporate conference on technology and innovation, has become “Yet another Conversation” — a virtual event that combines the presentation of our latest products and technologies with an open and candid conversation about our culture and values. The heads of key Yandex services talk about the thought process behind their products, discuss their plans and aspirations, and show what they have accomplished over the past year. They also discuss the challenges they have faced and how they managed to overcome them.

Some of the topics that we address include: recent developments in the driverless world, opportunities and challenges in delivery logistics created by the pandemic, and the latest capabilities of Yandex's core search technologies. 

Tigran Khudaverdyan, the Deputy CEO of Yandex, sat down with the well-known journalist and blogger Alexey Pivovarov to weave these stories together and to reflect on how Yandex has fared during the pandemic.

One of the highlights of YaC 2020 is YATI (Yet Another Transformer with Improvements) — a neural network based on the Transformer architecture, which allows us to evaluate semantic relationships between user queries and the content of web documents. Transformer architecture has several key advantages — it works not only with short texts, such as queries or article titles, but also with longreads. YATI is able to identify the most significant sections of a text and take that into account while delivering search results. YATI is also able to “understand” the relevant context, such as the sequence of words and how words affect each other. Overall, YATI is several million times more complex than our previous generation neural network and is one of the biggest updates to our core search technology in the last ten years.

At YaC 2020 we also presented a new addition to our family of smart speakers with the built-in intelligent voice assistant “Alice”. The new Yandex Station Max is the most powerful smart speaker produced by Yandex to date. It features advanced Dolby Audio technology for a perfect audio experience, 4K HDR for streaming films in crystal clear quality, and an interactive LED screen to visually augment Alice's replies.

Yandex Station Max has five speakers producing a total of 65W of power. Multiroom technology allows this device to be connected to other Yandex smart speakers, creating a continuous soundscape in your home.

Other new Yandex services highlighted at YaC 2020 include one-click delivery of Yandex Market purchases via Yandex Go, new features in the Yandex.Fuel app, an updated Yandex Search app with a personalized feed and new opportunities for our e-commerce partners in Yandex search. 

Watch YaC 2020 on YouTube.

Today at our annual Yet Another Conference (YAC) we announced major expansions to the Yandex intelligent assistant ecosystem that includes our new smart speaker, a new skills platform for our intelligent assistant Alice, and a new bundled subscription service.  Combined these developments offer the Russian audience more choice and the most advanced ability to navigate the online and offline world to date.

Over the years we have provided the Russian audience with many firsts and many highly localized smart products and services. And over time many of these products and services have come to operate together through our Search app to offer a more fluid user-experience. Last fall we enhanced that experience by introducing our Russian-speaking intelligent assistant Alice - first to mobile through our Search and Browser apps, then to desktops through Yandex Browser, and then to cars through our navigation app, Yandex.Navigator and the forthcoming integration in our Yandex.Auto connected car platform.

Building on our success helping users with tens of millions of daily interactions on Alice on multiple platforms, we are excited to welcome Alice to Russian homes in addition to building out more capabilities and benefits for users of our smart speaker and services.

A new platform & our first hardware launch

Our new smart speaker, Yandex.Station, is not only our first hardware product but it is the first smart speaker for the Russian market. With the introduction of Yandex.Station, Russian users now have the ability to rely on Alice and voice commands to manage a number of routine tasks in their homes.

Yandex.Station is the first smart speaker to incorporate a full video streaming experience.  A HDMI output allows Yandex.Station users to ask Alice to search for and playback videos, movies and television shows from a wide variety of sources.  Currently, Yandex.Station has access to Yandex's video streaming service KinoPoisk, as well as a wide range of other content including premium local video service providers ivi and Amediateka.

Yandex.Station will be available for purchase for 9,990 roubles ($160) this summer.

More collaboration and capabilities for our intelligent assistant

To further expand Alice’s functionality on Yandex.Station and all other platforms, we created a developers skills platform for Alice called Yandex.Dialogues.  This platform is designed to make it easy for any 3rd party developer to create new skills for Alice, ranging from a beginner programmer working on their first game to a major brand that can further enhance their customer experiences, such as a restaurant chain taking food orders.

Through Yandex.Dialogues developers can empower Alice to create custom conversations with users.  Developers choose a custom hotword that a potential customer can then use to activate a custom chat, game or whatever service has been developed. For example, a customer can say, “Alice, launch the Papa John’s skill” to activate Papa John’s skill that handles their pizza ordering.  Developers can also uniquely incorporate a live-chat feature to manage customer service that can include chatbots and live human operators to provide the best possible user experience.

The Dialogues chat functionality will also be available on Yandex’s search results page to further expand their reach.

Yandex.Dialogues is mutually beneficial for both our users and businesses. Users gain more choice and more efficient interactions with companies, while businesses have an innovative opportunity to reach and serve new and existing audiences.

Thanks to the creativity of hundreds of developers during the three-month beta testing period for Dialogues, Alice now allows users to interact with some of their favorite brands.   

Alice has the capability to help users order a pizza from Papa John’s, groceries from Utkonos and flowers from Flowwow.  Alice can also help users check MegaFon mobile phone account balances, exercise with Reebok, select air tickets from S7, search for a job with HeadHunter, study English with SkyEng, browse a McDonald’s menu, and consult with a Sberbank bot.  With Dialogues now publically available we look forward to all of the new skills that will help Alice serve users’ needs better.

New benefits and options for our users  

When it comes to offering more benefits for our products and services, we launched a new bundled subscription service for Yandex products, Yandex.Plus,that provides advanced opportunities to utilize the Yandex ecosystem.

Owners of the new Yandex.Station will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to Yandex.Plus, which regularly costs 169 roubles ($2.75) per month, and includes:

• Complete access to Yandex.Music, including unlimited downloads to mobile devices and high-quality music streaming.
• A 10% discount for Yandex.Taxi rides in the Comfort, Comfort+ and Business categories.
• Free delivery for customers in over 30 locations in Russia spending over 500 roubles on Yandex.Market's new marketplace recently launched in beta.
• A 5% discount for any Yandex.Drive ride with an extended car reservation period.
• Ad-free viewing of films and television series on the web-based version of KinoPoisk.
• Additional 10GB of free storage space on Yandex.Disk.

As we reflect on these important expansions to the Yandex intelligent ecosystem, we are excited by the advancements and opportunities this creates for the Russian audience and the entire global technology community.