Yandex introduced a new model of its smart column – Yandex.Station Mini. The device can be controlled not only by voice, but also by gestures.

• With a gesture you can turn the station on and off, adjust the volume.
• The synthesizer mode turns the “Station Mini” into a musical instrument, the sound of which depends on the movement of the hands.
• The column can do almost everything that Yandex.Station can do: manage a smart home, turn on music, read news, but it cannot turn on a movie or the TV station “Station Mini”. It can not be connected to a TV, there is no HDMI connector in the device.
• But there is an input for a 3.5 mm audio cable with which you can connect external acoustics – Yandex.Station does not have such an option.
• Like Ya.Stantsiya, Station Mini works with Alice, the voice assistant for Yandex.
• On October 30, the column will appear in the Yandex store in Moscow; on October 31, sales will begin with Svyaznoy and the Beru marketplace. A column costs USD 61.65.

The company introduced Yandex.Station in May 2018, sales started in July. According to estimates by Canalys analysts, from July to December 2018, Yandex sold 40 thousand of its columns, for the first half of 2019 – 60 thousand.

• The company itself disclosed statistics only for February-March 2019 – 5 thousand devices. The same number of Irbis and Dexp columns were sold (they are cheaper, they also have Alice, but the functionality, in comparison with the “Station”, is significantly reduced).
• In Russia, smart speakers are not as popular as in the United States, where a quarter of adults already use smart speakers. Amazon in incomplete 2014, when its smart column Echo was launched, was able to sell 600 thousand devices. By the beginning of 2019, the company had already sold 100 million speakers worldwide.

What’s next. After the “Station”, Yandex took up the smart home that Alice manages. The company has few own smart devices: a light bulb, a socket and a remote control. Third-party manufacturers (Redmond, Xiaomi) in partnership with Yandex release household appliances and electronics that work in the Yandex ecosystem and are controlled by a voice assistant.