Title	SOUNDS EASY!
Brand	YANDEX
Product/Service	ALICE
Category	D05. New Realities & Voice Activation
Entrant	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA
Idea Creation	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA
Media Placement	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA
PR	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA
Production	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA
Post Production	YANDEX Moscow, RUSSIA

Name	Company	Position
Alexandra Novokhatskaya	Yandex	Creative Director
Inna Omelchenko	Yandex	Senior Producer
Konstantin Pudan	Yandex	Copywriter
Valentina Ekimian	Yandex	Copywriter
Alexey Kalyan	Yandex	Copywriter
Vasilii Ovchinnikov	Yandex	Senior Art Director
Nikolay Nikitin	Yandex	Art Director
Olga Zarenok	Yandex	Producer
Ekaterina Kovaleva	Yandex	Producer
Petr Abroskin	Yandex	Director of Marketing Operations
Galina Tomashevskaya	Yandex	Product Marketing Manager
Matvey Kireev	Yandex	Machine Intelligence and Research Department PR
Bogdan Petrenko	Yandex	PR Manager
Maria Makeeva	Yandex	Manager
Elizaveta Strelkova	Yandex	Editor
Margarita Artemenko	Yandex	Editor
Natalia Tkachuk	Yandex	Editor
Alya Ageeva	Yandex	Editor
Mikhail Borisenok	Yandex	Editor
Vladimir Lopatka	Yandex	Senior Editor
Alexey Kadaner	Yandex	Head Of Editing Department
Kirill Egerev	Yandex	Editor
Elena Plotnikova	Yandex	Producer
Denis Borisov	Yandex	Illustrator
Alexander Tchernyavskiy	Tushite Svet Production	Production
Eugenia Fadeeva	Epic Production (Hype Network)	Sound Studio
Anton Popov	Epic Production (Hype Network)	Sound Studio

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

Alice is the most popular voice assistant in Russia designed by Yandex. And kids love talking to her. A lot. That’s why we wanted to help them spend more quality time together. We found out that the most common problem kids face is the speech disorder. So we decided to help them and to raise awareness about access to speech therapy and its importance in general. Now kids can talk to Alice and train their speech at the same time thanks to a speech-training tool available for free on any smartphone.

Background

Up to 70% of Russian preschoolers suffer from Speech Sound Disorder. If untreated, this may cause dyslexia and other disorders. What’s worse, there aren’t enough speech therapists, especially in country regions: statistics say there's 1 doctor per 420 children. Private specialists are not available for everyone because they’re pricey. We knew that preschoolers spend a lot of time with Alice – they feel comfortable communicating with the voice assistant. This fact inspired us to add the training skill to the app. Our mission was to make speech training free and accessible all over Russia. Also, to make the process easy and relevant for kids.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

So how do we help children develop their speech and make the training accessible to everyone? By adding a training tool into a voice assistant which is being used by 80% of Russians. To actually help the kids, we made this tool in collaboration with speech therapists, children’s poets, and some of the most popular singer-songwriters. Besides, we turned the training process into a song-based game: in order to work on a problematic sound, the kid had to sing a special song.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our plan was to make the tool engaging, effective, and accessible. 1) We found out that kids mostly develop their sound and speech abilities at the age from 5 to 7. 2) We invited speech specialists who came up with rules for every song and warm-up session. 3) Next, we created the content together with famous singers-songwriters who helped us develop the training melodies and songs. The speech specialists checked every song and guided the singers during the recording sessions. 4) We involved the Fixies, Russia's most popular cartoon characters, and based some songs on their melodies. 5) This collaboration made us visible for influencers and media, and even the Ministry of Education of Russia. 6) The app is available on any smartphone which makes the training free and accessible to 80 mln Alice users.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

The tool is basically the new way of speech training – it is a game-based song training integrated into a voice assistant. The first step is to choose one of the characters to practice particular sounds. It can be a Fixie, a famous cartoon character, or a Soundie, a specially created character voiced by pop-singers. The second step is a warm-up: repeat sounds after the characters. And the third step is to practice by singing a song. The characters also represent skills that kids acquire if they overcome their speech difficulties. Technically, the AI-powered speech recognition technology guides the child toward correct articulation by asking him to repeat the exercise in case of deviations. Together with a big team of enthusiasts, Yandex created songs according to the complex speech therapy principles and found a way to make the training accessible.

List the results (30% of vote)

– Sounds Easy became one of the two most popular skills in Alice's children's category. – The tool was also acknowledged by the Ministry of Education. – Sounds Easy was included into the school curriculum during the quarantine-2020. – Due to the tool's social significance, experts and artists contributed to the project for free. – Most importantly, speech training became available for all children for free.