Yandex Alice voice assistant “gets dumber” after drone strikes

The voice assistant Alice, once billed as Russia’s answer to Siri and Alexa, has been working erratically since Ukrainian drone strikes on data centers: it freezes, mispronounces words and makes more mistakes. Users write that it is “insanely dumb.” The problems began after drones hit Yandex data processing centers in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions in October, and their operations had to be halted.

The assistant now pronounces Russian words worse, freezes often, makes more errors when searching for information and sometimes does not respond to requests at all. “It hears me, but doesn’t answer any questions except about the weather,” one user complained on Telegram. Another noted that just two years ago the assistant was “much better and smarter.”

Promises a link and never sends it

“It either can’t find what I’m looking for, or offers irrelevant options, or says, ‘I’ll send you a link,’ but it’s unclear where it sends it. It never shows up anywhere,” one user wrote. People also complain about stress marks: “It puts the wrong stress in words. Strangely, it pronounces a word correctly on its own, but gets it wrong inside a sentence.” One person called Alice’s current performance “complete garbage,” and another said that after the attacks it has become “gloomier” and no longer answers as cheerfully as before.

According to the DownDetector service, complaints about Alice not working have been rising since late October, and over the past two weeks they have grown about fivefold.

What is known about the consequences of the attacks

In October, Ukrainians attacked three of the company’s six data centers. Users across Russia and in neighboring countries reported outages in taxi services and banking apps. The systems of the Federal Tax Service and arbitration courts were also affected, as were a number of companies, including Dodo Pizza, M.Video, Lenta and Magnit.

On Tuesday, Yandex said that almost three percent of user data had been lost permanently and could not be recovered.

The company’s three supercomputers located in the affected centers account for 73 percent of all Russian supercomputing power, with another 23 percent belonging to Sber, a source told the newspaper Kommersant. Experts estimate that replacing the equipment could take up to six months. Yandex itself maintains that the supercomputers were not damaged and will be redeployed at new sites, The Moscow Times added.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz