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September 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
Much of Alice’s audience comes from smartphone users, despite the fact that most devices have native digital assistants. Just like its cousins abroad, Russian virtual agent comes with Yandex. Station, the first smart speaker on the Russian market – some 40,000 of those were delivered
in 2018. Yandex was also fast to launch Alice’s own ecosystem for third-party access - an open platform Yandex.Dialogs. This move encouraged companies like Papa Johns, McDonald’s, Nicorette, and Skoda among others to make use of Conversational AI in their marketing activities and build their set of skills for Alice.
So within just two years, Yandex not only set the bar for other digital assistants but also laid the path for others: both companies and people alike are eager to embrace Conversational AI.
Oleg by Tinkoff Bank
Introduced by Russia's largest internet bank and “provider of lifestyle services”, Oleg the digital as- sistant was only released in June. Sure, in many ways the new virtual agent will need to catch up to a more mature Alice, but it already doesn’t shy away from chit-chat and generally lives the con- cept “a friend who is always nearby”.
Created for finance and lifestyle-related tasks with a mission to help users navigate the Tinkoff ecosystem, Oleg recognizes and interprets com-
mands, asks follow-up questions, fixes certain problems and speaks on a variety of topics.
But most importantly, Oleg is 100% home-grown - yes, a banking institution has built an AI-powered voice assistant from scratch. Since 2014, Tinkoff has been developing deep neural network mod- els and voice technologies as part of its AI First strategy. The company also boasts its speech rec- ognition technology with an accuracy rate of 95%, which works even in a sound-polluted environ- ment. Besides, Tinkoff has its own biometric sys- tem, which works 99.99% of the time, and its own voice synthesis technology, based on WaveNet, Tacotron and Deep Voice neural models.
At the moment of launching, Oleg's skills comprised transferring money to Tinkoff Bank and Sberbank accounts, making restaurant reservations, booking beauty appointments, searching for discounts, purchasing movie tickets, offering money advice and life-hacks, managing credit cards, changing personal information and much more. In the future, Tinkoff is planning to further integrate Oleg into its ecosystem, which spans travel, mobile, investment, insurance, and entertainment services.
To use the assistant now, one needs to launch the Tinkoff app, which might to a certain extent hinder its adoption. Still, the company is addressing that by making most of Oleg’s functionality is available in a hands-free mode.
So while Oleg is a relatively young digital assis- tant, it already has a competitive edge, that’ll take others great effort to surpass. Being able to iden- tify a user's voice using biometric data and offer- ing services where security is key, it can provide
a smooth experience for customers without the perils of multi-step authorization.
Marusya by Mail.ru Group
In June leading Russian tech company and Yandex’s main rival, Mail.ru Group tech holding, owner of Russia's two most popular social networks Odnoklassniki and VKontakte,