FX.co ★ Sales of Yandex smart speaker have started: what makes it different

A new development by Yandex, a multimedia platform with artificial intelligence, can be considered a quite revolutionary step, since before that the Russian company produced only software products.

Yandex.Station works on the basis of a voice assistant named Alisa. You can just talk with the gadget, or you can ask to perform small tasks, to set an alarm clock or tell a story.

In order to revive the station, you need to say the word-activator: "Alice" or "Yandex".

The gadget can turn on music depending on the preferences of its owner, and can also find and show movies in such applications as Amediateka, ivi.ru and Kinopoisk (the device connects to a TV with Smart TV function via HDMI-wire).

The device will find reference information for you, show a forecast or data on traffic jams, or remind you of tomorrow's flight. In the future, the developers plan to teach the column to manage various devices in the house.

A major advantage is that the station supports the Russian language. This distinguishes it from other similar devices. The price of the gadget is 9,990 rubles ($160).

Yandex.Station is equipped with seven microphones instead of one, which form a so-called microphone matrix. This helps the device hear and recognize the owner's commands, even if it is located in another room and neighbors are drilling a wall.

Thanks to the matrix, the voice source is determined and other sounds are cut off. The speaker is capable of perceiving commands even during loud music playback.

The microphone matrix can be turned off. Then the device will not react even to words-activators. This function is created specifically for those users who are afraid that artificial intelligence will eavesdrop on them.

Yandex experts believe that the voice interface is the future. For several years from the moment when the opportunity to enter the address "without hands" appeared in the mobile service "Yandex.Navigator", the number of voice requests to it reached million a day.

In March 2018 the company launched a beta version of the Yandex.Dialogues platform, which, according to the developers, will help Russian businesses integrate voice management into their services and products. And at the same time, it will make the potential set of skills of the Alice Russian-speaking voice assistant virtually unlimited.

You can buy a smart speaker only in an offline store so far, but soon it can be ordered through the Internet.

According to company estimates, no more than 1,000 devices will be sold on the first day due to the bandwidth of the store. Demand for the Yandex.Station speaker is great, so only two devices are given in one hand.