By Yoon Sung-won
Naver and LINE Corp. unveiled their artificial intelligence (AI)-based assistant platform Clova at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 in Barcelona, the companies reported Thursday.
According to Naver and its mobile service subsidiary, Clova, which stands for “cloud virtual assistant,” aims at an AI platform that works based on the five human senses.
“Clova is a platform that incorporates various AI technologies including vocal, visual and conversational engines,” LINE Corp. CEO Idezawa Takeshi said in his keynote at the MWC 2017, Wednesday.
The two companies are jointly developing Clova by improving Naver Labs’ voice-recognizing assistant service AMICA. They said it will expand the system to have more cognitive capabilities to make it more humanlike.
Naver and Line took advantage of their own technologies to design the advanced system that is composed of a cognitive engine, central processor, a device and application bridge, and a processor expansion unit.
In particular, the central processor will integrate a diverse AI-based module and engine technologies such as natural language understanding, dialog management and neural machine translation. The processing unit can analyze the conditions it has perceived and draw conclusions that best match any given situation.
Naver and LINE will seek partnerships to jointly develop devices, applications, services and content compatible with the Clova platform. They will also open the platform to attract third-party businesses to join in the business.
The two companies said they will begin by applying Clova to their existing web and mobile services. Two assistant speaker devices are also planned to be released in Japan and Korea this year.
They will also team up with Sony and Japan’s largest smart toy maker Takara Tomy to launch diverse products based on the Clova platform. Sony plans to release Clova-based products next year.
LG Electronics will also join the collaboration to introduce the AI platform technology to its home appliances and internet of things (IoT) devices.
“We will release Clova in Korea and Japan first because the two countries have diverse databases and content,” the two companies said in a statement. “We will gradually expand to Asia and other global markets to build an ecosystem for the platform business.”
On Thursday, LINE said it has acquired Japan-based IoT startup vinclu to develop a virtual home robot based on Clova.
“Innovative IoT products are being devised and developed by vinclu,” the company said. “In particular, its virtual home robot ‘Gamebox’ is drawing attention not only from Japan but also globally.”