Yandex updates Alice AI's image generator to render Russian text in pictures

Yandex has updated the image generator in Alice AI. The service can now render Russian text in pictures correctly, a task that AI generators around the world have long struggled with.

What exactly improved

The generator, which works inside the chat with the bot, now accurately reproduces Russian letters, words and even long phrases in images. Alice used to produce pictures with typos and with flipped or unreadable letters. That was a serious problem for users who wanted a ready-to-use illustration with accurate Russian text. Improvements to the model's training have now solved it.

For all users

The improvements are available both to regular Alice AI users and to business customers on paid subscriptions. That considerably widens the range of uses for the generator. Marketers, designers and content creators can now use Alice to make social media posts, ad materials and complete illustrations without extra work in Figma, Photoshop or another graphics editor.

The upgrade is especially useful for companies that serve Russian-speaking audiences and need to generate content with text quickly. Banners, video covers and ad materials can now be made in minutes rather than hours.

Main use cases:

• Banners and social media posts
• Ad materials and landing pages
• Illustrations with captions and comments
• Presentation and talk design
• Visual content for blogs and articles

Why this was a hard problem

Rendering text in images is one of the hardest tasks for modern AI models. Text demands precise spatial geometry for every letter and correct placement on the canvas, which is much harder than drawing ordinary objects. With Russian, the difficulty grows several times over: the model has to do more than draw Cyrillic correctly — it also has to follow Russian rules of spelling, punctuation and typography.

Western models such as DALL-E handle English text better for a simple reason: they are trained on huge volumes of English data. Local players like Yandex have an important advantage: they can optimize specifically for Russian and its cultural and linguistic features. That lets them achieve results that compete with global offerings.

How it works

Yandex has not disclosed the full technical details of the update, but the improvements work at the architectural level of the generator. The model now better understands how to place letters and words within the image space. Special data with Russian text was also added to training, which helped the model learn to write Cyrillic correctly.

Testing showed that the generator now handles long phrases, complex words and even several paragraphs of text. Accuracy has improved significantly compared with the previous version.

What it means

Yandex is positioning Alice as a full-fledged content creation tool for the Russian-speaking market, not just a multifunctional chatbot with various skills. It is an important step amid growing competition among AI generators. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta — all the tech leaders are pouring enormous resources into improving their models, but often with a clear focus on English and Western markets.

For Russian-speaking users, this means they get a tool optimized specifically for their needs. Yandex's update shows that local services can find their niche and a competitive edge by becoming genuinely better for a specific language, culture and audience. That is an important principle in the era of global AI competition.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.