"Alice" teaches foreign languages

In the future, Alice will learn to speak not only Russian, but also in foreign languages. This is quite logical expansion of the “voice assistant” to foreign markets. However, direct competition with Amazon and Google is not planned yet, because first of all Alice will learn not English, but Ukrainian, Belarusian and Kazakh, the employee of Yandex said in a comment to Vedomosti.

The Yandex search engine does not enter the world market, but only works in regions where it can compete with Google. For Alice, they chose the same strategy. According to the source, support for the first foreign languages ​​may appear as early as 2019.

Yandex is significantly inferior to Google in the share of the search market on mobile devices in all post-Soviet countries, except Russia (in the graph Statcounter statistics for August 2018). If devices with “Alice” get the same popularity as Android devices with Google, then “Yandex” can change the situation.

Ukrainian indicators of “Yandex” are especially modest, because officially in this country the services of “Yandex” do not work. In May 2017, the Ukrainian authorities ordered operators to block them along with the Mail.ru Group services. I wonder if Alice’s services and all devices with this SDK, including other manufacturers, will be blocked in Ukraine? "Yandex" hopes that this will not happen.

Political analyst Alexei Makarkin, in an interview with Vedomosti, made far-reaching conclusions that Yandex is preparing to change the language preferences of the audience in post-Soviet countries. According to him, Ukraine is now actively promoting Ukrainization, Belarus is promoting the Belarusian language, the authorities of Kazakhstan are also concerned about the development of the Kazakh language.

According to analysts, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan are a big market, but even in the aggregate it is about 2.5 times less than the Russian one. In Russia, there are now about 67 million mobile Internet users. Accordingly, in the three countries named together about 27 million mobile Internet users.