Kakao CEO Chung Shina presents Kanana at the if(kakaoAI) 2024 conference on Oct. 22, 2024 (Coourtesy of Kakao)
South Korea’s platform giant Kakao Corp. will roll out a conversational AI agent-integrated messenger app, dubbed Kanana, in the first half of next year in hopes of catching up to its rivals at home and abroad in a race to lead the artificial intelligence service market.
On Tuesday, the first day of its annual AI conference if(KakaoAI) 2024, Kakao announced that it will release the beta service of Kanana, its new conversational AI service, this year for in-house tests so it can officially launch the AI messenger service in the first half of 2025.
Kanana is Kakao’s first business-to-consumer (B2C) AI service, which will be serviced in a stand-alone messenger app, separate from the company’s KakaoTalk, Korea’s most popular messenger app used by more than 95% of the country’s population.
Kanana’s AI agents – personal secretary service ‘nana’ and group chat agent ‘kana’ – can remember all conversations made in the app and understand the context in dialogues to generate the most personalized and tailored responses to different users, Kakao said.
Only invited friends can have conversations on Kanana like KakaoTalk.
“In the era of generative AI, Kakao aspires to be a hyper-personalized AI service that can take the context and emotions of individuals in relationships and conversations into consideration,” Kakao Chief Executive Chung Shina said at the conference, which ends on Thursday.
Lee Sang-ho, Kakao’s Chief AI Officer, presents Kanana services on Oct. 22, 2024 (Courtesy of Kakao)
Kakao’s new AI messenger service centering around more user-friendly services underscores its different AI focus from its cross-town rival Naver Corp., which has been striving to develop novel large language models (LLM) to build sovereign AI.
“Kanana’s ability to generate the most personalized responses is its greatest strength that makes it stand out among peers,” said Lee Sang-ho, Kakao’s Chief AI Officer.
MOVE TO TRANSFORM INTO AN AI COMPANY
With the release of Kanana, Kakao will accelerate its plan to become the so-called AI native company, said Chung.
An AI native company refers to a company designed around the use of AI, where its products and operations cannot function effectively without the integration of AI.
“With generative AI, we will expand the ways and targets of Kakao’s unique core value of forming bonds with others through relationships,” said Chung.
Kanana will be Kakao’s new AI brand that will be used for the company’s other mainstay AI models and new AI services.
Kakao’s former AI R&D unit Kakao Brain is merged under Kakao in May
Kakao is currently developing various LLMs, multimodal LLMs and image-generating AI models and will introduce language models by sizes under different lineups such as Kanana Flag, Kanana Essence and Kanana Nano.
In January, it unveiled its multimodal large language model (MLLM), Honeybee, that enables reasoning across text, images, video, audio and coding.
Kakao pins high hopes on its new AI services after years of lagging behind its local and overseas peers in the AI race.
It unveiled KoGPT, a Korean LLM in 2021 but the Korean generative pre-trained transformer based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 has failed to impress the market despite the company’s claim that it is the most powerful Korean language chatbot trained primarily on Korean text.
It developed an upgrade KoGPT 2.0 last year but permanently postponed its debut, originally planned in October last year.
Kakao’s headquarters in Seoul (Courtesy of Yonhap)
In May this year, Kakao merged with its AI R&D subsidiary Kakao Brain to place it under its wings and then launched a new AI unit called Kanana in June.
To enhance its AI capabilities, Kakao has consolidated various teams scattered throughout the organization into the AI unit.
But the market’s response to Kakao’s various AI efforts is cold.
Some even raised concerns that the new separate AI messenger service, Kanana, could cannibalize KakaoTalk.
Kakao shares dropped 5.2% to end at 37,350 won ($27.10) on Tuesday.
By Ji-Eun Jeong
jeong@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.
