Swipe down on the KakaoTalk screen with two fingers, and Ryan, Kakao's flagship character, pops up with a greeting. Ask it to "order bottled water," and it searches for products based on past purchase records, applies available coupons and completes the payment.
That was a demonstration of "Kanana Space," the new artificial intelligence assistant unveiled by Kakao (035720). The company plans to turn KakaoTalk, the messenger used by 50 million people, into an "AI secretary" that carries out everyday and work tasks. Kakao aims to build its own ecosystem in the global AI race by leading with hyper-personalized AI that remembers users' conversations, preferences and past activity.
Kakao CEO Chung Shin-ah, speaking on the 13th as the first keynote speaker at the if(kakao)26 conference held at the Kakao AI Campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, said: "The AI Kakao is pursuing does not simply answer questions. It understands the user's intent and actually carries out the tasks they need." The CEO's remarks signal a plan to develop KakaoTalk into an "integrated agentic AI interface" where various AI agents are connected to fulfill user requests.
The centerpiece service is Kanana Space, an AI assistant that can be summoned anywhere in KakaoTalk by gesture or engaged through voice. It performs a range of tasks from sending messages to managing schedules, searching for information and changing KakaoTalk settings, and users can also hold everyday conversations with Ryan, its AI persona.
What sets it apart is its ability to grasp the user's context and follow through with actual actions. Asked to "tell me today's schedule," for instance, it organizes appointments and to-do items identified in KakaoTalk conversations and even suggests what to wear, factoring in the weather and workout plans. Kim Dae-nyeon, head of design at Kakao, said: "On KakaoTalk, the user's intent and the context of their relationships shift with every screen change." That, Kim said, is "why we designed Kanana Space not as a separate tab or screen but as an AI layer that opens anywhere in KakaoTalk."
Kakao began accepting advance applications for Kanana Space on the same day and will offer selected users a trial starting in December. The company plans to introduce AI characters drawing on various intellectual property beyond Ryan.
Kakao also unveiled "Kanvas," a service that lets users build their own AI agents. Users set the role of the agent they need on a PC, and the AI connects suitable tools and functions to carry out the work. Linked with KakaoTalk, it can take on repetitive tasks as well as complex everyday chores such as filing taxes or year-end tax settlements. Kakao plans to run a closed beta test of Kanvas for a small group of users as early as this year. It will later add a feature allowing users to share the agents they have built.
The company is also pushing ahead with "Project Mosaic," which will serve as the foundation for personalized AI. The technology links user information and activity histories scattered across KakaoTalk, Kanana Space and Kanvas, managing them as a single memory system. Within the scope a user has consented to, it passes the necessary context to each agent so that work can continue even when the service changes. Song Jae-ha, Kakao's chief technology officer, said: "Our goal is to make sure users do not have to explain previous conversations or ongoing tasks from scratch just because the service has changed."
Kakao is also advancing its own AI models to support these services. Noh Byung-seok, who leads foundation model development at Kakao, said: "Through our own tokenizer optimized for Korean, we process the same Korean sentence 1.6 times more efficiently than competing global models." He added that "our in-house embedding model understands the meaning of a question and finds the relevant information." Kanana Space will also draw on "Kanana-o," a multimodal AI model that understands text, images and voice together and responds by voice.
Chung said Kakao will "connect everything from the agents Kakao provides to those built by partners and users themselves, so they can be met, talked with and assigned work through a single familiar interface." The CEO added: "An experience where whatever you build connects within KakaoTalk — that is Kakao's new direction."