April 26, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] Naver, South Korea‘s top Internet portal operator, plans to unveil an artificial intelligence embedded smart speaker, the WAVE, this summer, industry sources said May 9.

According to the sources, Naver and its Japanese affiliate LINE Corp. are working to launch the smart speaker based on its AI virtual assistant, Clova CLOud Virtual Assistant, before the end of the first half.

The WAVE speaker is said to be unveiled in Japan under the brand of LINE, and Naver is also considering launching it in South Korea.

Clova, which is similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Apple‘s Siri, combines speech recognition and natural language understanding to respond to a user’s questions or to call up information, such as the weather. Unlike previously launched AI platforms, Clova will utilize big data to provide various customized services depending on a user‘s culture and geography, the sources said.

By Alex Lee and newswires (alexlee@heraldcorp.com)