Alice AI Can Help Blind Users Better Navigate the World Around Them
Yandex has given its AI assistant Alice a major upgrade. The new features enable it to "show" the surrounding world to blind and visually impaired users while also adapting its communication style to the person it is speaking with.
Yandex unveiled the update at Young Con in Moscow, the company's annual youth technology festival designed to help young people launch careers in information technology.
The update spans every core model that powers conversations with Alice, including its language, search, and multimodal models. One of the biggest additions is an accessibility version of Live Mode in the Alice mobile app for blind and visually impaired users. They can now ask the AI what is around them, such as where the entrance to a store or another building is located, or what appears on a washing machine display.
The Secret Behind Live Mode
In Live Mode, Alice helps people with disabilities complete everyday tasks and navigate their surroundings more independently. It can tell users whether a delivered package is damaged, identify which medication is on a table, or describe what food is inside a refrigerator. Using the feature is straightforward: launch Live Mode, point the smartphone camera at the object or area of interest, and ask a question aloud. The conversation continues naturally through voice interaction, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and request additional details.
A chat history is automatically saved, making it easy to revisit previous conversations. Users can activate the feature either through the app's menu or by asking Alice to launch Live Mode. The feature is available free of charge in the Alice mobile app for both Android and iOS devices, although voice activation is currently limited to Android. According to Yandex, iPhone users will receive voice activation in a future update.
Today, 20 Yandex services, including Alice, Taxi, Mail, Browser, Books, and Music, have already been adapted for blind and visually impaired users. Alice can also understand voice requests from people with speech impairments, while other accessibility features continue to appear across Yandex products, including specialized options in Yandex Go and audio descriptions in Kinopoisk.
More Conversational and More Empathetic
Rather than simply answering questions, Alice now guides users toward solving problems so they can reach the result they need. The AI explains concepts more often, performs calculations, and compares alternatives instead of providing only factual responses. For example, if someone asks about apartment heating rates for a 45-square-meter apartment, Alice can demonstrate how to calculate the expected utility bill. The assistant has also become more adaptive in conversation: it mirrors a user's communication style, remembers previously shared facts, and, when appropriate, can switch to the more informal Russian form of address.
According to the developers, the AI has also become better at recognizing when users need encouragement and can respond with empathy. Anyone who prefers not to use these personalized conversational features can disable them in the settings. Alice has also improved its ability to understand products, charts, and diagrams. It can explain complex graphs or technical schematics and help users interpret mathematical formulas they find difficult to understand.
Helping Users Choose the Right Product
The updated AI presents users with a broader range of product recommendations, compares prices and specifications, and explains which option is likely to fit their needs best. Previously, if someone asked which Wi-Fi router to buy, Alice returned a list of models with technical specifications but without considering the user's particular situation. Now it tailors recommendations to individual needs and explains why one product may be a better choice than another. These new capabilities could make everyday life easier for blind and visually impaired users by increasing their independence when shopping, finding products, and navigating indoor environments.
At the national level, the Alice update represents another step toward expanding an accessible digital environment built on Russian AI technologies. It also illustrates how accessibility is becoming a competitive differentiator for digital ecosystem developers rather than simply a compliance requirement for user interfaces. A distinctive feature of Yandex's approach is that these capabilities have been built directly into a Russian-language AI model and adapted specifically for Russia's digital ecosystem.
