Leading Russian consumer lender TCS Group that operates Russia’s only pure online bank Tinkoff Bank has launched B2B speech recognition services, Kommersant daily reported on July 22 citing representatives of the company.

TCS will allow third parties to develop their own voice recognition applications such as voice assistants and robots for call centres using the Tinkoff VoiceKit. Tinkoff Bank’s AI assistant, dubbed ‘Oleg,’ was announced in late 2018.

The market for outsourcing solutions for voice services is estimated at 3 billion rubleq annually, and is already quite saturated by large players. Among them are Internet majors Yandex and Mail.ru Group.

Yandex.SpeechKit is used for Yandex AI assistant Alisa and Yandex.Navigator smart car solutions, as well as outsourced to MegaFon, MTT, Modulbank, Just AI, and other companies.

MRG Tech Lab of Mail.ru Group is also active in the field, as well as the Center of Speech Technologies (CRT) of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank.

The Russian banking sector is on the forefront of developing systems based on biometric and other data. In the end of 2018 Russia’s largest bank Sberbank said it plans to buy the CRT speech recognition developer from Gazprombank-affiliated companies for RUB5bn ($75 million).

In April, TCS also reported creating its own supercomputer Kolmogorov, named in the honour of great Russian mathematician.