The virtual assistant Alisa was officially announced in 2017. At the moment, it can recognize natural speech and incomplete phrases, respond with intonation, and take into account the context of the conversation. Here its functionality is not limited — Alisa is constantly and intensively developing, mainly due to the skill of self-learning.
Voice assistant Alisa is a special software from Yandex Company that allows you to solve various applied tasks in a dialog with the user. You can simply talk to Alisa, just as you would talk to a normal person. Alisa can both recognize human speech (based on SpeechKit technology) and generate it (based on Text-to-speech technology). That’s why it is called a voice assistant.
The Alisa program is based on the principle of machine learning: the more different users send requests and the more frequent their dialogs with the station, the more meaningful the artificial intelligence’s responses become. For example, while previously Alisa (Alice) could simply not perceive individual commands that were not pronounced clearly enough or contained words that were not commonly used, this problem has now been almost completely corrected.
Alisa is eager to learn everything that can basically be done with the help of the Internet. For this purpose, firstly, it is integrated with almost all Yandex services (Search, Traffic, Weather, Food and so on), and secondly, the developers have given everyone the opportunity to use it in their own developments (you can write your own skills for Alisa). Moreover, Yandex encourages developers to expand Alisa’s skills in every possible way, for example, by holding contests for the best ones.
And now a little bit about naming. Choosing a name for the voice assistant took several stages. First, a list of requirements was drawn up. For example, the name should not contain the letter “R”, which small children cannot pronounce, the name should not be too common and too long. Yandex employees then compiled a list of names that, in their opinion, suited the voice assistant’s personality. Based on this list, a poll was compiled for Yandex users. In the final poll, the name “Alisa” (the Russian version of Alice) won by a large margin.
What is Alisa?
Alisa is the name of a voice assistant based on artificial intelligence developed by the Russian company Yandex. It recognizes and executes many voice commands: it searches for information on the Internet, turns programs on and off, adjusts the sound volume, and switches music tracks. Alisa has become the most popular Russian-speaking representative of smart electronic assistants.
In terms of visual identity, Alisa voice assistant has been pretty constant, with just slight alternations of shades and sizing on the logo, which has gone mainly unnoticed. The main idea of the designers here was to create a visual representation of the Alisa’s environment and style.
The Alisa logo, designed in 2017, is quite a progressive and minimalistic image, composed of a white triangle with arched sides, set on a solid purple circle. This triangle is a mediator that replaced the white microphone located on the talk button with the voice assistant. The choice of the triangle is due to the fact that geometric shapes are primarily associated with everything related to the phrase “artificial intelligence”. So, the purple circle is Alisa’s environment or home, and the white mediator is herself.
The visual identity of the Alisa voice assistant is based solely on the graphical element, with no additional lettering, hence there is no official typeface used for this product. As for the color palette, it is a combination of purple and white. At the beginning of the Alisa history, purple had some gradients, but later the designers decided to use the flat shade, as it looks more progressive. Purple is the color, standing for creativity and imagination, which suits the voice assistance more than anything else.