Kakao unveils new AI assistant service to be launched on KakaoTalk

YONGIN, South Korea, Oct. 13 (Yonhap) -- Kakao Corp. unveiled Tuesday its integrated artificial intelligence (AI) assistant service, Kanana Space, set to be launched on its popular messenger app KakaoTalk following a closed beta test in December.

The new service, which will be able to understand users' verbal requests, was introduced at the company's annual developers' event held at its AI campus located in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, south of Seoul.

"We will transition from a graphic user interface (GUI) ... to a language user interface (LUI) which can understand the context and purpose of the speaker, to create a user experience where requests are made seamlessly and tasks are performed swiftly," Chung Shin-a, chief executive officer (CEO) of Kakao, said.

The Kanana Space service is built on a layered AI architecture, and will be able to recommend workout clothes based on weather and users' workout data, or plan schedules by understanding a user's message history on the KakaoTalk app, according to a demonstration of the service at the event.

The company also outlined its technological strategies for its foundation AI model, Kanana, powering the new service.

"Our principle is we provide the best outcomes for all requests but do not use our biggest model for all of the requests," a company executive overseeing the development of the foundation model said.

Kakao applied the Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation, a type of AI post-training technique, to maintain the quality of its smaller language models, the executive added.

"The key metric for the quality assessment of generative AI is moving from whether it can put out good answers to whether it can complete requested tasks," Chung said.

"We plan to create an AI that provides palpable change to people's daily lives, by adding intelligence that understands individual differences on top of a service that connects everyone."

fairydust@yna.co.kr
(END)