April 20, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] South Korean internet giant Naver and its mobile messaging subsidiary Line Corp. unveiled a  new artificial intelligence-powered voice assistant platform March 1, emerging as a new Asian rival to forerunners in the field such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.

Line’s Chief Executive Takeshi Idezawa introduced a set of new AI software tools to power its AI online assistant Clova that responds to voice commands in Korean and Japanese, during a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

 

Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa. Naver

Short for Cloud Virtual Assistant, Clova came from a new body dedicated to AI technology called “Project J,” which was formed jointly by Korea’s largest portal operator Naver and its mobile messenger Line last year.

Similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant, Clova combines speech recognition and natural language processing abilities to respond to a user’s questions and call up information such as the latest weather, news and shopping information.

Unlike current AI platforms in the market, the cloud-based Clova will utilize big data to provide tailored services depending on a user’s culture and geographic location, the Line CEO said.

It will train itself from the wealth of data collected via Naver in Korea and Line messenger in Japan in the local language.

Clova will initially be launched as a smartphone app and a standalone speaker called Wave between April and June in Korea and Japan, and later expand into Line’s other core markets including Thailand and Indonesia.

In the long run, Naver plans to further program Clova to recognize additional sensory inputs such as visuals, as it expects AI will expand to eventually come to encompass all of the five human senses, the company said.

Line Corp. has already joined hands with tech giants LG Electronics and Sony to install Clova into consumer electronic gadgets, homes and toys.

The company announced at the MWC that it has acquired Tokyo-based Vinclu, an Internet of Things startup that develops home robots, in a move to develop a new line of Clova-equipped home robots in the future.

By Sohn Ji-young/The Korea Herald (jys@heraldcorp.com)