Yandex has released a social-search iOS-application for the United States

Yandex has released a social-search application called Wonder, which combines its own search algorithms for the iOS platform with data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as voice recognition from Nuance, TechCrunch writes .

The application is released only for the American market and as a "pure experiment." It is expected that some key Wonder technologies will also be used in other applications in the future. The Wonder application itself may appear in other markets, including Russia - it all depends on its success in the United States.

The application combines data from users of various social networks, and using the easily accessible API and voice service Nuance, it provides recommendations on where to go, what to see, what kind of music to buy, and so on. It allows users to directly make purchases wherever possible - for example, in the case of music.

The application was developed by the American team of Yandex. According to TechCrunch, directly behind the project is a team of three from the startup The Tweeted Times, which Yandex bought in 2011. According to the same source, the Moscow office did not take the idea seriously until the application was already developed.



Yandex blog notesthat Wonder currently supports searching by places, music, and news, and only a few types of questions. However, the scope of the application can be expanded based on user feedback.

The release of the application for the United States helps Yandex to strengthen its presence in the American market, demonstrate the ability to work with English-speaking users and with data in English. In addition, this is a way for Yandex to roll out to the market three services that will soon appear one way or another in other Yandex applications.

Firstly, this is a technology that Yandex calls the "natural language understanding system." This is a voice recognition service that is based on Nuance technology and that understands issues and other types of interaction.

Secondly, this is the Yandex algorithm, which helps to collect and integrate streams from various social networks to find the latest and accurate information. “We want to look at the data of social networks without duplication and errors,” they say in Yandex.

And, thirdly, this is another step towards aggregation: “We are experimenting with an interface in which all the information that the user is looking for can be placed in one folder.”