The Russian search giant “Yandex” has launched its first product for the US market: a voice-controlled social search app called “Wonder”.
“Wonder” is available on iOS. And this app pulls data from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter accounts of the users to answer questions like “What places my friends had visited nearby ?”
It can be considered as mobile version of Facebook’s new Graph Search.
– If you are looking for a proven sushi place in New York, you can just ask: what sushi restaurants do my friends go to in New York?
– When you are looking for coffee shops in a new area, you can ask: coffee shops nearby.
– If you need to catch up with your friends on a Friday night, just ask: where do my friends party?
– You know your friend John has a good taste for music, ask: what music does John listen to?
– Feel like listening to electronic music, ask: I wonder what electronic music are my friends listening to?
– Want to catch up on news, ask: news shared by my friends.
The information that the user receives in Wonder in response to their questions comes from their friends across a number of social networks. For example, a location-related question brings visual stacks of pictures together with friends’ tips from Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare.
Wonder supports natural language, which is English so far, and features a voice user interface built using the speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion technologies provided by Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:NUAN).
The user can start asking questions in Wonder a few minutes after they have provided access to their social network accounts and the first portion of data has been collected. The more data is collected over time, the better the answers.
Yandex Wonder can be freely downloaded from here.
It seems Facebook is blocking API calls from Yandex Wonder.
