Russian President Vladimir Putin
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin has praised Yandex — the parent company of Yango — for bringing up-to-date intelligent technologies from Russia to Africa.
Mr. Putin disclosed this on Wednesday in his opening speech at the Sochi Resort, where the Russia-Africa Summit and Forum was taking place. It was attended by high-ranking representatives of all African countries including President Akufo-Addo and other government officials.
Besides, Mr. Putin commended Musheg Sahakian, Global Expansion Director for Yango, who was invited to address the participants during the economic forum.
Musheg, sharing latest updates on Yango’s global expansion and success in general, said Yango and other services of Yandex were currently operational in 18 countries, including Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.
Mr. Sahakian stressed that good earnings for drivers together with affordable prices and high-quality service for users had been made possible due to the unique Yandex ecosystem of services (search, maps, navigations, artificial intelligence, voice assistant and 90 others), which distinguished it from its competitors.
“Russia is going back to Africa with a high-tech product. The quality of our IT solutions is seen in the fact that Russia is the only market where domestic internet services compete successfully with major global players in open competition,” stated Mr. Sahakian.
He further spoke about Yandex’s self-driving cars which were currently being tested in several countries and had already made 1,000,000 miles of driverless rides. “These are ‘ideal drivers’: they never get tired or need to sleep, they obey rules and self-learn over millions of hours of driving experience,” he said.
“And while the future is coming, and cars still need drivers, Yango pays great attention to the safety and security of rides. Yango’s technologies can automatically track speed and driving behaviour can check how long a driver has been behind the steering wheel, automatically ban policy violators from the system, and even conduct technical and visual vehicle inspections. What’s more, Yango’s own cameras can track a driver’s fatigue and attention analyzing their mimics and eye movement in a real-time mode,” he added.