MOSCOW, July 20The technology of the Alice voice assistant does not allow it to eavesdrop on people; in addition, the devices have a microphone mute button, which blocks this possibility even from a hardware point of view, Dmitry Masyuk, director of the Yandex search and advertising technology business group, said in an interview.
““This is technologically impossible,” Masyuk answered the question of whether “Alice” eavesdrops on people. 
«»Moreover, all our devices have a microphone mute button, which simply blocks at the hardware level any possibility of hearing something (i.e., turns off the power to the microphones — ed.). There are such myths, but this is not true at all. not like that,» he added.
In April, Yandex launched a new version of its voice assistant “Alice”, based on the Yandex GPT 3 neural network, it simply explains complex things and makes up less, as well as a paid “Pro” option. According to the company, the voice assistant's monthly audience is 77.1 million users, and it receives 5.2 billion requests every month. «Alice» has a 78% share in the Russian virtual assistant market.