Did you ever wonder what it’s like to build an AI personal assistant, or to bridge the language gap? Hint: There’s big data and machine learning involved.

Today, another AI assistant is joining the party with Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Viv, and the gang. Her name is Alice, and she comes from Russia. Yandex, the Russian internet giant, has big plans for the future and Alice is a key part of those.

Recently, Yandex celebrated its 20 years in Moscow, and the celebration was an opportunity to visit Yandex HQ, converse with some of its top minds, and get the lowdown of what’s cooking and how things work behind the scenes.

Like most high-tech vendors these days, Yandex is using tons of data and advanced machine learning (ML) to develop its products and services. In this case, there is the additional twist of locality and language that Yandex has to cater for, and looking at how Google and Microsoft alumni do it at Yandex illuminates the state of the art.

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