Yandex Details Alice Voice Assistant Audio Buffering and Data Handling in Android Apps
Yandex has published a comprehensive technical reply to recent scrutiny of its Android applications, addressing allegations of excessive data collection including audio, contacts, and banking information.
The company confirmed that the Alice voice assistant maintains a cyclic audio buffer of roughly 1.5 seconds prior to the activation phrase and 0.5 seconds afterward. This buffer operates in memory when the app is open, and a portion of the audio preceding a command may be sent to servers to evaluate speech recognition quality. Yandex noted that remote adjustment of buffer size could raise user concerns and pledged to impose strict limits in an upcoming release.
Regarding contacts, Yandex stated that access supports voice commands such as “Call mom.” On initial synchronization the entire address book may be transmitted to servers, after which only modifications are sent. Names and numbers are not hashed because raw values are required for accurate speech recognition.
The company emphasized that its applications do not read message content from WhatsApp, Telegram, or Viber. They only observe contact details that these messengers publish to the system address book on Android.
Accusations concerning insecure handling of bank cards were dismissed: card details are routed directly to an isolated PCI DSS environment rather than ordinary application servers. The VPN interface was attributed to network diagnostics, the backup DNS to bypassing provider outages, and the list of other applications in the manifest to a standard Android mechanism.
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