Russian search giant Yandex made its own smart speaker

[LASER_oneXM]

Content source

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/29/17405790/yandex-station-smart-speaker-alice-russia

Russian search giant Yandex has launched a smart speaker to compete with the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Google, the company announced today. The speaker, called the Yandex Station, is the company’s first attempt at hardware, and it’s equipped with a Russian-speaking voice assistant called Alice that was developed in-house.


Alice has over 4,000 skills such as hearing workout tips, finding flights, ordering pizza, and helping you cast video to TV. The smart assistant first appeared in Yandex’s mobile app last October, and the company has plans to bring it to its taxi business, which merged with Uber last year in Russia.

The Yandex Station is likely only going to be available in Russia, and it will cost $160 (9,990 rubles), providing locals with a more accessible and regionally adapted smart speaker than those offered by Amazon or Google. It will be available this summer, bundled with a premium subscription to Yandex music, streaming, and taxi services.

 

[37507]

Is Yandex a respected company privacy wise? I know they're based in Russia which does not concern me much and I even used their web browser for a bit. I stopped using it after I set my default search engine to Bing; it would redirect my searches through trovi.com which is a browser hijacker. I had to manually add Bing as my search engine as selecting Bing from the preset of selectable search engines would lead to trovi.com. None of the other selectable search engines would redirect me through Trovi, just Bing. I could not trust Yandex anymore so I switched back to Firefox.

 

[TairikuOkami]

I stopped using it after I set my default search engine to Bing; it would redirect my searches through trovi.com which is a browser hijacker.

Opera based browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, Yandex) have that problem, since Opera has some kind of a deal with Bing, so Yandex has no choice.