At the Yet another Conference 2019 event, Yandex introduced a range of new products and services, including a 'smart' home featuring the voice assistant 'Alice'.
Yandex's smart home includes the use of intelligent lighting fixtures, 'smart' sockets, and other household devices. You can ask 'Alice' to turn on the lights, lower the air conditioning temperature, or increase the music volume.
To control the 'smart' home, you'll need a device or app equipped with 'Alice': for example, the smart speaker Yandex.Station. You can give commands to a single device or multiple devices at once. The 'smart' home allows you to set up any scenario: choose the desired devices and actions, and create a phrase for activation. For instance, the greeting 'Alice, good morning' can trigger music playback and turn on the kettle.
The platform is compatible with dozens of devices from companies such as Philips, Redmond, Rubetek, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Additionally, Yandex introduced three of its own gadgets for the 'smart' home: a smart bulb, a socket, and a remote control. The bulb adjusts brightness and color, the socket allows you to remotely turn connected devices on and off, and the remote controls appliances with an infrared port.
More information about Yandex's 'smart' home and the available devices can be found .
Another newly introduced gadget is called ''. It connects to the TV's HDMI port and streams video from the Yandex app to the screen. You can interact with the module through 'Alice': in response to a voice command, the assistant can pause a movie or turn up the volume. The gadget costs around 2000 rubles.
At the same time, Yandex launched a personal video channel called 'It adapts to viewers' interests and offers each person the most suitable content. The channel provides a variety of materials: movies and clips, interviews, sports competitions, and vlogger videos. The service selects what will be interesting to each viewer. When choosing content, Yandex uses its knowledge of users: what they watch on the company's services, which videos they rate, and what topics they are interested in. The service creates a schedule for each person for a couple of days, along with selections of movies and shows. Viewers can rate videos and remove those that do not suit them from the program, and the service will immediately find a replacement.
Another new product from Yandex is the family subscription Plus. It provides users with additional features: full access to Yandex.Music without ads, discounts on Taxi and Drive, extra space on Disk, and the ability to watch over 4000 movies and series on Kinopoisk. The family subscription Plus for four people will cost 299 rubles per month.
Source: 3dnews.ru
