Yandex plans to localize the voice assistant Alice in Uzbek. At present, the Russian company is not willing to disclose specific plans.

“We have a desire to translate “Alice” into Uzbek, but we try not to disclose our plans. Uzbekistan is included in the list of countries (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), where we occupy an active position. We are trying to develop all our services, but this is a huge process,” Yevgeny Lukyanchikov, regional director of Yandex in Uzbekistan said.

At the same time, he noted that in 2019, the company will localize for Uzbekistan about four services, “which are relevant for the local market”.

According to Lukyanchikov, the voice assistant is “super popular” in Uzbekistan, where “a unique situation has arisen – a huge proportion of voice queries along with manual dialing”.

The press service of the company clarified Kun.uz that now the share of requests through Alice in the search of Yandex in Uzbekistan is about 25%, and the total number of search queries in the past six months has increased almost 2 times.

In September 2018, the newspaper “Vedomosti” reported that Yandex was planning to create a multilingual version of Alice. At that time, the publication voiced concerns about localization of “Alice” in the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Kazakh languages.

“Alice” has existed since October 2017. It is used in the column “Yandex.station”, “Yandex.telephone”, as well as in various applications of the company, including Yandex.browser and Navigator. Every day, 8 million users access a voice assistant. Monthly audience is 30 million people.