Russia weighs giving Yandex's Alisa AI deeper access to phone and speaker data
Kommersant reports that Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is weighing rules that would grant Yandex's Alisa AI assistant expanded access to data on users' phones, tablets and smart speakers, storing that data on Yandex's own infrastructure. The rules would set pre-installation requirements for domestic apps on smartphones, tablets and speakers built around Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant sold into Russia. An earlier version of the draft resolution, later pulled from public view and sent for revision, described the assistant as a service with access to apps, system functions, notifications, authorization and hardware capabilities.
Server-side data collection at the assistant level gives Yandex a direct line into device-level signals that advertisers currently piece together from app analytics and measurement panels. Campaigns running search or programmatic inventory inside Yandex's ecosystem could gain richer first-party targeting data for attribution models once the rules clear revision, though the scope of hardware-level access remains undefined. Yandex's own figures, a 4.6 times jump in e-commerce traffic from Alisa AI this year, up 358%, point to conversational AI opening a new purchase path worth tracking outside search and display.