Yandex has added support for the Altai and Karelian languages to its "Translator". The new directions are already working on the website, in the mobile application, and directly in the translation block in Search.

Karelian belongs to the Finno-Ugric group, spoken by about 14 thousand people. Altai is part of the Turkic group and has approximately 70 thousand speakers. Now Yandex Translate supports nine Turkic and eight Finno-Ugric languages of the peoples of Russia.

To launch, data from specialized organizations and universities were used: the authorities of the republic and the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences helped with Karelian, and materials for Altai were provided by Altai State University.

Yandex is also developing other capabilities for small languages using neural networks. For Tatar, Chuvash, Bashkir, Udmurt, Mari, and Yakut, voice input and voice acting are already available – a phrase can not only be translated but also heard its pronunciation.