Tinkoff launches beta version of its voice assistant to Russian mobile subscribers

By Megha Bhattacharya

Tinkoff has announced the launch of a beta version of its free voice assistant Oleg which will now be available to all residents of Russia who use mobile phones. Tinkoff’s voice assistant will protect them from spammers and fraudsters. Oleg is a smart personal assistant which is now available not only to customers of various services within the Tinkoff ecosystem but also to subscribers of any Russian mobile operator which is what makes it unique globally. It can be easily activated both in the Tinkoff super app and via popular messengers such as Telegram and VKontakte.

Oleg uses technologies from the Tinkoff VoiceKit, a provider of voice recognition and synthesis services. It recognizes people’s speech, can convert audio into text and activate different conversation scripts for different categories of incoming calls if a subscriber does not answer them. The voice assistant has scripts for “useful” calls, spammers, and potential fraudsters.

Stanislav Bliznyuk, Chairman of the Management Board, Tinkoff said, “Today people in Russia have two big problems while making and receiving calls on mobile phones: spammers who inundate them with calls and fraudsters who try to deceive them. This is why we decided to train Oleg to turn it into a “wall” between mobile subscribers and undesirable calls, and open it to subscribers of all mobile operators. We noticed that people have a real problem for which we have an excellent fintech solution.”

Tinkoff Mobile subscribers have been able to use Oleg services since December of 2019. The new version of Defender Oleg available to all Russian mobile subscribers has been under development since March 2020: it has been trained on more than 110 million calls.

Recently, Tinkoff announced the launch of Russia’s first digital BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) service Dolyame.ru. Buyers can pay for goods in instalments without incurring interest, and sellers can immediately receive the full purchase price in their account without commissions or delays. According to Tinkoff, the Dolyame.ru service allows customers to split the purchase price into four equal parts. In order to make a purchase, they need only cover 25% of its price. The remaining three quarters is debited from the buyer’s card on a bi-weekly basis until the full payment amount is received.