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September 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
As for Oleg, its user base already consists of the bank’s clients whose personalities have been officially verified. Voice recognition technology helps process around one million calls, while a biometric system, trained on customer voice data, helps the call centre combat fraud. This gives Tinkoff an unprecedented competitive edge, by supporting information-sensitive operations on one hand and efficiently automating customer support on the other.
Besides the Russian market is not reduced to these three: Google Assistant and Siri have come to Russia. Local corporations, including one of the
Russian app FaceApp causes international controversy
FaceApp, a seemingly innocent mobile application capable of realistically transforming photos of people's faces using the artificial intelligence technology, has come under fire amidst allegations that the app could misuse users' personal data.
The app was launched in St Petersburg last
year by a company named Wireless Lab, which has since moved to Russia's largest tech hub Skolkovo. However, it came under the global Klieg lights just weeks ago thanks to its newly added ageing feature.
The ageing filter allows users to transform their photographs in an attempt to get a glimpse of what they might look like at an older age. The feature wasn't totally new, but what made FaceApp stand out among many similar apps was the quality of transformed images, which look very realistic.
three leading telecommunications operators, are rumoured to be working on virtual assistants of their own, and Chinese manufacturers are looking to enter the market.
As the market becomes more saturated, competi- tion is sure to get tougher and players will need to get creative to survive. Will Yandex’s Alice keep its lead? Will Mail.ru Group successfully exploit its advantages? Will Tinkoff expand its presence beyond the banking app? Will other players find their niche? Right now there are no answers to those questions.
Although doctors quoted by Russian media
said that transformed images were not necessarily accurate as the app apparently lacked a consistent algorithm, the transformed images appealed
to users.
FaceApp quickly went viral thanks to global celebrities, such as basketball player LeBron James, who used the app to publish their ageing photos.
As a result, the app netted over $1mn in revenues in just 10 days, from July 9 to 19, according to App Annie, compared with a total of $11.6mn collected since the iOS version was launched in January 2017, followed by an Android version a month later.
However, while millions of people across the globe played with the filter and shared their ageing photos on social media, some politicians viewed the app as something less than innocent.