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Linguistics

Russian has masculine, feminine, neuter, paired and common gender. I also found a reference mutual kind, but I don't really remember it - Wikipedia says that it is used for animals that did not come up with a version of the word feminine or male- see "rat" for all types of rats and cat/cat pairs. My teachers called this the "common" gender.

The word "assistant" is a masculine word. The word "assistant" is feminine, quite widely used. This is not a newfangled feminist like the words “author”, “actor” and “director”, which can be scary to use openly, because there is a risk of shifting the discussion of the news to the discussion of an open feminist statement.

A native Russian speaker should not have any problems with the meaning and gender of the words “assistant” and “assistant”. The only potential problems are the possible gender (sexist) connotations that grammar Russian language is not related.

I do not like the fact that Yandex reinforces these connotations with its deliberate choice of masculine nouns: “assistant” and “assistant”.

Yandex rules

It won’t work to the argument “Well, maybe it’s called “Alice’s voice assistant”” - according to Yandex’s guide- and style-books, its services are not quoted. I worked at Yandex.Money for two years, I know.

Yandex.Money, Yandex.Taxi, Yandex.Alice or simply Alice. There are no quotes around Yandex or Alice.

Alice's personality

Alice was invented by a woman. The developers talk about Alice using feminine verbs and pronouns:

• “For this, it is necessary that she understand real human speech, and not just perfectly pronounced requests." - Denis Filippov, head of speech technologies at Yandex. Source: Yandex released the Alice voice assistant.
• “Let's say you asked 'Alice': 'What's the weather like tomorrow?' - she answered you: "+7 and clear." - Ilya Subbotin, Alisa Product Manager. Source: How Yandex created Alice.

Alice was given a personality. Her name, according to the service team, was tested with users. Alice was taught to joke, react caustically to stupid jokes, and gain knowledge while interacting with users. Here are quotes from an article written jointly with Yandex about this on VC.ru:

To give the assistant a personality, the team needed to determine the gender, age, name, and personality traits of the character, describe the behavior, and compile lines that the assistant would use to communicate with the user - "editor" responses.

The developers decided that the assistant would be a young girl who is always ready to help the owner of the smartphone, but at the same time does not allow familiarity. She is correct and keeps her distance when they try to offend her, but she is not arrogant and does not boast of her knowledge.

“Users cannot be asked directly which name is more suitable for an assistant, and we asked slyly. They took the characteristics we needed - and vice versa, completely inappropriate, and began to ask: if a girl has such a name, then she is more likely, for example, kind or aggressive?

The team also chose a voice for voice acting, which "lay down" in the character. Tatyana Shitova dubs Scarlett Johansson in Russian films. Scarlett voiced the role of AI in the film Her ("She"). Tatiana voiced Scarlett. And by the way, a whole set strong women and characters in the first and second plan, including Juno and Harley Quinn. You definitely know this voice.

The project team certainly did not miss the obvious association with the strong, brave and beautiful Alice from the childhood of a noticeable part of Yandex users. This Alice was, in principle, the only Sci-Fi, geek and nerd girl in the USSR (well, except for Gadget, but this is after Perestroika).

Being a woman is not humiliating

When I posted a screenshot of Alice's main page on her Facebook one of my friends wrote:

And some girls told me that “assistant”, “secretary”, “boss”, etc. - sounds humiliating.

This is the point of my claim.

The word feminine is perceived humiliatingly (“incorrectly”) even by the creators of the virtual woman, who recognize that she is a woman and endowed her with feminine qualities and personality.

To put it bluntly, "it's a shame to be a woman." Being a boss is cool, being a boss is humiliating. Assistant is a fashionable expression in a world where AI has existed for less than five years in the public space, and being an AI assistant is a shame.

This needs to be changed at the level of the "public" language. It's not even about introducing new revolutionary language norms - "bot / ka /", "robot / ita /" - but about feel free to use the old ones.

Alice is a virtual young girl (I won't even discuss "young" now). Helper and assistant. It doesn't seem to be very difficult. Not humiliating and not ashamed.

But there are connotations, of course. A girl is sitting in a bar, you come up to her and ask what she does, she says - "I'm a personal assistant." Through how many first associations, jokes and smirks do you need to wade through to see a person behind her?

If the largest Internet company in Europe, as it were, legitimizes this word through its natural use where it is fully consistent existing grammatical norms of the language, it may be easier.

I requested comments from Yandes officially and not really, I will keep you informed. So far, there has been no public reaction.

The name of a person is not just an element of self-consciousness and a sign of individuality. Being born, we all receive a “personal name”, which partly becomes a kind of predetermining moment of the fateful Alice? What are its roots, and what character are its owners endowed with? You will learn all this from our article, and you will also be able to understand why your girl behaves this way and nothing else. For those who only decide to name the child by this name, it is a must read!

The girl who will be called Alice

As a rule, future mothers and fathers choose a name for their unborn baby in advance. Which is quite understandable, since today the process of determining the sex of an intrauterine fetus is not difficult. Often we name our children after our parents, sometimes after grandparents, thus demonstrating respect and even reverence for our ancestors, and at the same time we agree that the “choice” is really worthy to continue its existence in the form of a new person. Do you know what the name Alice means? Moreover, such a sharp transition in the narrative is quite justified, since this feminine “beginning” really has a unique ability to dress the gifted girl in unpredictability itself and surround her with an aura of mystery. However, from now on, everything is only about her only ...

Name origin

The secret of the name Alice is actually hidden in short form German address to Adelaide. We will talk about the mystical meaning, but onomastics sheds on mysterious origin named informative light in the form of several more versions:

• "transformation" of Old French Aalis;
• we can see the Latin roots in the word alis, which means "wings";
• a variant of the pronunciation of the name Elisha, Elina, Elizabeth (Elizabeth).

In the 12th century in England and France, it was fashionable to call a girl Alice, so to speak. Many historical figures represented by European monarchs were the bearers of this noble name. Therefore, if you decide that the girl should definitely be called Alice, be prepared for the fact that she will show royal. However, the delicate nature of the “princess” will definitely require a certain attitude towards herself and, accordingly, the general attention of others.

Alice: name meaning

The character of a girl with young years definitely expresses practicality and an incredible will to win. However, fantasies and the world of illusions are also not alien to the impressionable Alice. She always remains friendly with her peers, but she never misses a chance to once again prove her outstanding organizational skills. Despite the calm nature, Alice will always be in the thick of things. The girl's prudence and inextinguishable sense of justice will become her life companions. Having transformed and matured, a woman often does not quite “ladies'” affairs, representing in her person a rather serious competitor for men, who later begin to understand what the name Alice means. Unfortunately, this comes too late. Responsibility and purposefulness, multiplied by perseverance and pronounced insight, allow ladies with that name to occupy quite influential positions. And yet, Alice always remains the "weaker sex", so romance and love are also characteristic of them, however, they never lose their heads. They get married late. In marriage, they usually feel like the mistress of the situation, and if the other half does not understand them, they declare a total war, in which, of course, they win a glorious victory. As a rule, they have one child - a son.

A short digression in the form of a clarification

"And yet, what does the name Alice mean?" - you ask. The fact is that some sources believe that it came from the ancient German "baby". Which is still a dubious statement, since it does not stand up to criticism from authoritative experts in the field of onomastics. However, the short form of the Old French alis is identical to the Germanic short form Adalheid (Adelaide), where adal is “noble, noble” and “heid” is “clan, estate”. As a result, we have: “noble by birth” or “noble estate”. And nothing else!

Psychological picture

Despite the grace and natural sophistication of feminine beauty, the "German" character of the name Alice makes its owners strong personalities who value order and accuracy in everything. Work, life and family for women noble birth"- a single whole. However, prioritization is entirely within their competence. Objective and self-confident Alice is able to achieve, if not everything, then certainly a lot. Women of this type do not just like to lead and command subordinates, but do it with special skill and innate abilities inherent only to them. It is worth noting that, despite the desire to be the first and the “imposition” of unconscious superiority, a female leader always maintains friendly relations with her colleagues, thereby justifying her noble name Alice. The meaning, the origin of her "beginning" for her is always a source for research. internal forces which she very rarely refers to. Since, among other things, such strong ladies have a “perfect weapon”, presented to them by generous nature in the form of a wonderful talent to charm others with the beauty of a lovely face and sweet, charming words. What, in principle, they never disdain for the sake of achieving their goals, despite some internal moral contradiction.

Name Compatibility

A certain mystery of the name Alice, its mystery and mystical power hidden potential allow a woman with a certain ease to build her own happiness with men who are practically different in character. Perhaps the most important thing for her in a relationship is the sincere feelings of a partner, mutual understanding and loyalty. Only a harmonious combination of all these qualities allow Alice to believe what she has found. true love. A girl is capable of self-sacrifice only when she has convincing evidence that her soul and soul mate belongs to her alone.

Alice will be happy with romantic Eugene, Vitaly, Vyacheslav and Stanislav. Despite the extraordinary abilities and talent of submission, a woman with a noble name should still avoid Sergeev, Romanov and Andreev, since an alliance with these representatives of the stronger sex is fraught with problems. Moreover, we can say that the rupture of relations in this case is predetermined.

Magic combination of symbols

It is worth noting the special designation of the name Alice:

• A - the initial letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, personifies the beginning of something, the desire to realize the plan and bring it to life.
• L - artistry and talent, striving for excellence and thirst for new knowledge. Subtle understanding and perception of beauty.
• AND - spirituality of personality, sensuality and kindness. The ability of a person to hide a romantic nature behind a screen of practicality and cold prudence.
• WITH - the desire for stability and material independence, intractable capriciousness and lust for power with irritability. The only thing that matters is the life path you find on your own.
• A - you can only add an uncontrollable desire for spiritual and physical comfort.

Finally

Of course, a person himself has the right to decide his own destiny, he is the blacksmith of his own happiness. But it is foolish to disagree with the pattern of events and the common sense of proven truths. We did not invent this world, and the set of established rules of astral significance does not depend on us. And yet, do not panic fatalists - be optimistic!

The whole truth about the creation of the legendary rock band

This year legendary band Alice is celebrating its twenty-ninth year since its founding. In all rock encyclopedias, the date of formation of the group is indicated in 1983 - then, on the wreckage of his previous projects, Svyatoslav Zadery assembled a group, the vocalist of which was Konstantin Kinchev. However, the story of "Alice" began even earlier.

In the early 80s, Svyatoslav Zaderiy created the Crystal Ball group, a team that is no different from others musical rock bands that time. They performed at the so-called “dances” (yes, they managed to dance to hard rock at the “dances!”), had unsightly and random recordings, home-made equipment, which, by the way, was assembled by the permanent sound engineer of “Alisa” Yuri Shlapakov. Vocalist " crystal ball"was Andrey Khristichenko - a sophisticated young man with energetic vocals and a typical rocker delivery.

The Crystal Ball collapsed due to the conflict between Zaderia and Khristichenko. The team left behind only one recording, published in 2001 by audio pirates.

Then came a series of new vocalists and titles musical groups: "Daphne", "Magic" ... And in 1983 the fateful sounded - "Alice". Yuri Shlapakov quite simply explains why the group was given such a name: “Everything is very simple - our country, this is a wonderland. And we somehow exist in it.” The leader and founder of the group, Svyatoslav Zaderiy, spoke more ornately about this: “When in the eighties they asked me what “Alice” was, I answered that “Alice” is a quasi-three-dimensional phantasmagoria. When I said this, all subsequent questions fell away by themselves ... "

• October 10, 2017 "Yandex" officially its voice assistant "Alice".
• At the heart of "Alice" - neural networks, which recognize speech, interpret it, compose answers and synthesize the voice of the assistant. "Alice" is trained on huge arrays of texts in order to communicate with the user on free topics.
• There are also "editor" remarks written by the team to answer popular questions.
• One of the main challenges in developing such a system is to understand what users will be interested in and how they will ask about it. Someone asks the search engine “where am I”, someone asks “what is my geolocation”.
• The main differences between Alice and competitors (for example, Siri) are integration with the company's own search engine and the presence of a neural network, with which the assistant independently generates new replicas.

Why Yandex took up the development of a voice assistant

By 2017, the world's largest IT companies presented their voice assistants: Siri from Apple, Assistant from Google, Alexa from Amazon, M from Facebook, Cortana from Microsoft work in the English-speaking market. In Asian - Duer from Baidu and Bixby from Samsung.

The company began to create Alice at the end of 2016. The service began to be developed because the entire industry is moving in this direction: the user wants and is ready to solve his problems in the form of a dialogue with a virtual assistant, algorithms are ready for this, and you can move from voice input to a meaningful dialogue.

When the user has the opportunity to ask a question with his voice, he begins to speak like a human being. Instead of “Lada Kalina 2007, cheap to buy a cardan shaft,” he asks: “Where can I buy a cardan shaft for a 2007 Lada Kalina”? He does not invent a search query, does not formulate it, as he used to do, but simply asks.

Both search algorithms and dialog interfaces are moving in this direction in parallel. But in the voice assistant there is a link to the context - that is, the ability to retain the meaning of the replicas and understand whether subsequent statements are related to them.

Let's say you asked "Alice": "What's the weather like tomorrow?" - she answered you: "+7 and clear." The next question might be: “What about the weekend?” It is easy to understand for a person, but difficult for a machine - after all, it does not even have keyword"weather". The dialogue assistant can match the lines and understand that you are still talking about the weather.

Ilya Subbotin

Product Manager "Alice"

According to the developers, Yandex users already know how to access the company's services by voice - the Listen, Yandex command works in Search, Navigator, and other applications. So they won't have to get used to the new interface.

Ilya Subbotin, Alisa Product Manager

From a user point of view, the project team says, several things change with the advent of Alice. In addition to the dialogue interface, the assistant has acquired a personality - "Alice" shows emotions, knows how to joke and "does not tolerate humiliating treatment towards her." You can now address her by name: "Listen, Alice."

From a technological point of view, a multilayer neural network is now responsible for the work of the assistant, which learns from arrays of texts, understands the meaning of the request, and independently synthesizes speech.

How Alice works

Alice is built into the Yandex search application. You can communicate with the assistant both by voice and by entering requests from the keyboard. When possible, "Alice" responds to question asked directly in the dialog interface, in other cases - shows the search results on request or the desired application.

under the hood

Alice is based on neural networks: they recognize speech, analyze it, determine the topic of the dialogue, highlight useful information for searching, and synthesize the answers of the assistant.

Almost all computing, apart from voice activation (recognition of the phrase "Listen, Alice"), is carried out in the cloud. “Of course, it would be interesting to transfer part of the calculations to a smartphone so that Alisa could sometimes work without the Internet,” says Ilya Subbotin. “But the computing power of smartphones is too low for such tasks.”

Machine learning technologies have reached the level where the user can simply speak with the application and see that he understands - and the synthesized voice takes on a sound close to natural.

Alice's team

At the same time, the global scientific and technological community is only at the beginning of the journey - the algorithms will continue to improve. Speech recognition, synthesis, conversation topic detection - all this should work even better.

There are general product metrics by which you can evaluate the work of the assistant - user satisfaction, application usage frequency. But there are more complex parameters, explains Subbotin. For example, the ability to be in the context of a conversation: the assistant must remember what the user asked him, be able to correctly interpret additional questions and give relevant answers.

“From the relevance of one specific dialogue in the future, it will be possible to move on to personalization and multitasking: ideally, when I get ready for work, I can ask what to wear, “Alice” will look at the weather, the route to the office, decide what is the best way to get there, and Based on this, he will advise me what to wear.

How to objectively assess the system's ability to conduct a dialogue is not yet clear. The length of the dialogue says little about its content: the conversation can drag on if the user is interested in discussing something with the assistant or if the assistant cannot solve his problem for a long time. But even a short dialogue does not always speak of successful solution Problems.

Emphasis on search

The developers of Apple's Siri voice assistant are deliberately increasing the number of dialog scripts so as not to show the user search results. The Alice team does not have such a task, because Alice is a different product.

Apple doesn't do this out of a wealth of choice. It's just not a search company. We are completely different. For us, search comes first. best product which we have.

It’s too early to guess how the assistant integrated with the search will be adapted to work on other devices, says the product manager Alisa: the industry has not yet figured out which devices will be in demand among the audience, and in addition, such devices will involve different scenarios of interaction, under which the system can be adapted.

“In any case, the user has a task that he wants to solve - by interacting with a voice column or, say, a car control system. In the case of a column, the emphasis will probably be on music or news - and we have music and news services. In the car, the driver is interested in maps. It is unlikely that he will ask the car: "buy plastic windows cheaply."

Large technology companies are betting on ecosystems of "smart" devices - and this expands the possibilities of interaction with the assistant. If a device without a screen needs to show search results or open an application to answer a question, the assistant will be able to launch the desired service on another device, such as a smartphone.

“It's just a matter of adapting to the device,” continues Subbotin. But to be honest, we don't know yet. One of the leaders in the industry - Amazon - is still experimenting with formats: the company has an Echo column, a mini version of the Echo Dot, options with a camera, with a screen.

Personality

The personality of "Alice", according to the developers, is one of her main competitive advantage. Projects designed for the English-speaking audience do not try to create a strong emotional connection with the user, but on the contrary, rather move away from him.

To give the assistant a personality, the team needed to determine the gender, age, name, and personality traits of the character, describe the behavior, and compile lines that the assistant would use to communicate with the user - "editor" responses.

Together with a journalist, writer and former head of the Yandex search marketing group Vladimir Guriev, the developers described the character's character and chose suitable lines for him.

In total, the team described about 320 scenarios in which the assistant responds with editorial remarks. For each of these scenarios, from two to seven answers are provided, which the system selects randomly. “That's enough to form a personality, but not enough to fuss about everything in the world,” says Subbotin.

The developers decided that the assistant would be a young girl who is always ready to help the owner of the smartphone, but at the same time does not allow familiarity. She is correct and keeps her distance when they try to offend her, but she is not arrogant and does not boast of her knowledge.

The assistant must also be ironic and - this is important in the context of artificial intelligence systems - self-ironic. “The fact is that our speech synthesis algorithm - and all competitor algorithms - are not very good at emotions. "Alice" laughs a little at herself, adding the words "joke" or "sarcasm" where necessary. Because she knows to herself that she can’t intonate well yet, ”the developers explain.

How the name was chosen

The team compiled a list of names that employees felt best suited the selected personality traits. The name was also subject to technical requirements: for example, it should not have the letter "r" - it is not pronounced by small children.

In addition, the name should not have been included in other words or phrases. As one of the options, the developers considered the name Maya - but it could provoke recognition errors on phrases like "May Ninth". It was also important that the name was not included in the list of the most popular female names in Russia - in order to reduce the number of false activations. Alice is not included in such a list, but for those users who have Alice in the family, it will remain possible to activate the assistant with the “Listen, Yandex” command.

Having decided on the options, the developers, together with sociologists and Yandex analysts, compiled a survey for users of the Toloka service. In it, the company asked to determine the character traits of a girl by name. “Users cannot be asked directly which name is more suitable for an assistant, and we asked slyly. They took the characteristics we needed - and vice versa, completely inappropriate, and began to ask: if a girl has such a name, is she more likely, for example, kind or aggressive?

By a wide margin, says Subbotin, the name "Alisa" won the poll. “And no one ever told us during testing that it was a bad name.”

How "Alice" learned during testing

In total, several tens of thousands of people took part in the testing of the assistant, and it lasted five months.

The main thing that we found out during this time is that we are moving in the right direction. And that the questions that we thought users should be concerned with are actually of interest to them.

Before starting testing, it was important to determine the most likely scenarios of interaction: the questions that users would ask "Alice" - and also to understand exactly how they would ask them.

“We understood that people are worried, for example, about the weather. Great, to talk about the weather, you need to react to something - to some user phrases, ”says Subbotin. Having decided on the topic, the developers described the simplest scenarios: for example, when the user simply asks: “What is the weather like now?”. Then more complex options were added: a weather forecast for a specific date, for several days, for several days in the next month.

Another popular topic is positioning. Initially, the Alice team collected several replicas that users could use to activate the scenario, but it turned out that often people ask questions in a completely different way than the developers might have expected. “We included: “where am I”, “where am I”, “what is my location”, “what is my current address”. And the user asks: "Tell me, please, where is my geolocation." We couldn't have foreseen this."

Developers track the types of user requests and the relevance of the assistant's responses and add new scenarios to the assistant that were not originally built into it.

The team is also developing a special dialogue model - inside the company it is called a "chat" - which in the future can take over all communication with the user on abstract topics and learn new remarks on its own.

"Chatterbox" is trained on large arrays of texts, including dialogues. Sometimes, the creators say, they cannot predict the answers of "Alice" - they turn out to be so humane - and sometimes she can be rude to the interlocutor. But developers track incorrect replicas and remove them from the system.