Russian online giant Yandex has launched a voice assistant, "Alisa", available on Android and iOS and, as a beta-version, on Windows, the company said on October 9.

Based on neural networks technology, the assistant can recognise speech, understand the user's request and provide assistance. Yandex claims that "Alisa" is more than just a voice assistant, but a character with a personality and a sense of humour.

The voice of "Alisa" is Russian actress Tatyana Shitova, known for dubbing Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson in Russian versions of her movies. Amazon's virtual assistant, "Alexa", doesn't have a Russian language version. 

Currently, "Alisa" can work with several Yandex services, including the search engine, maps, music and weather.

"We want "Alisa" to speak with people in their language rather than impose her own, as it was the case with computer interfaces in the past," Denis Filippov, head of the speech technology division at Yandex, said in the company's statement.

He added that "Alisa" can recognise normal human speech with incomplete sentences and mispronunciations.

Yandex is also in the process of developing an audio device that would be able to recognise human speech, Vedomosti reported.

In late September, Yandex presented "Alisa" to President Vladimir Putin during his visit to the company's headquarters.

However, the voice assistant struggled to answer the president's questions, responding to Putin's inquiry as to “Are they mistreating you here?” by saying “I’ll take it into account.”

When Putin asked what "Alisa" was doing, she replied, "Looking at recent pictures of cats on Yandex. Cats are the best!"

In April –June, Yandex saw its revenue rise 23% y/y to RUB22.1bn (€316mn).

The company's advertising revenues, which made up 95% of the top line, were up 21% y/y to RUB20.9bn, while other revenues, mostly comprised of Yandex.Taxi’s revenues, rose 59% y/y to RUB1.2bn.