Tinkoff has launched 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. 

The new voice assistant is unique also because it can be easily activated both in the Tinkoff super app and via popular messengers such as Telegram and VKontakte.

Oleg can answer, record and transcribe calls, including calls from unknown numbers. Oleg can also converse with callers and recognize their speech activating necessary conversation scripts.

Oleg is not just a personal assistant but also a “defender.” This voice assistant has special functions aimed to protect people from dangerous, undesirable or annoying calls from spammers and fraudsters. 

Oleg is a product of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It uses technologies from the Tinkoff VoiceKit, a market leader in voice recognition and synthesis. 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.

Currently, Oleg can respond to more than 100 different call scenarios. The voice assistant learns as conversation scripts get regularly updated by a special team of people who regularly perform in various stand-up comedy shows.

Oleg can also hold a conversation: it can tell jokes, if it is asked to do so, or offer advice on how to get protected from fraudsters.

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.  

Stanislav Bliznyuk, Chairman of the Management Board, Tinkoff:

“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.”

The future version of Oleg will be able to recognize undesirable calls in real time and automatically redirect them from Tinkoff customers and Tinkoff Mobile subscribers. Oleg will also be able to tell more jokes and to improvise, and it will adapt to new call scenarios using conversation scripts by popular Russian scriptwriters. In general, it will become more intuitive.