SKT begins AI personal assistant service

By Yoon Sung-won

SK Telecom unveiled Wednesday the nation’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-based home assistant dubbed “NUGU,” which recognizes Korean language, in Korea.

Starting from the AI home assistant service, which can be compared to Amazon Echo and Google Home, the nation’s largest telecom company said it will boost collaboration with third-party enterprises to expand to more diverse applications such as automobiles, wearable devices and humanoid robots.

“The voice-based user interface (UI) is much more natural than the touch UI because users do not need to learn the controls,” SK Telecom Device Supporting Division Executive Vice President Park Il-hwan said during a press conference in Seoul, Wednesday. “Starting from the introduction of NUGU, we will incorporate our AI-based technologies and services into our devices to offer greater values to our customers.”

The telecom company said it has conducted the research and development of original technologies such as AI, speech recognition and natural language processing since 2012. It has combined natural language processing, big data analysis, cloud computing, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to realize the AI system.

NUGU will be first applied to a cylinder-shaped device consists of speaker, microphone and processor parts. SK Telecom has tapped into the Astell & Kern sound tuning technology of its subsidiary iriver to optimize the speaker unit’s sound production.

Once the device is connected to the cloud network through the wireless Internet, users can give verbal orders so as to make the device play music, control smart home devices such as electric receptacles, gas valve locks, air purifiers and dehumidifiers. The company said it will improve the device to support more diverse services such as mobile navigation T-map and Internet protocol TV Btv.

The users can also ask for information such as weather condition and personal schedules and the device answers in the voice of young female through the text-to-speech function. SK Telecom said it plan to offer more diverse voice options in the future.

However, the AI device has limitations.

Though the company promoted that the device can be used to place orders for food delivery or online shopping malls, it does not have voice identification and security functions for commerce options. Users may also experience delays in voice recognition because the device must be connected to a Wi-Fi network, which has the fundamental limit of occasional disconnection due to frequency interference.

SK Telecom said that the application is based on the machine learning framework and thus is designed to be able to improve its own performance including speech recognition accuracy as more customers start busing it.

To encourage more partners join in its AI business initiative, the telecom company said it will release NUGU’s application programming interfaces (APIs) in the first half of next year.

“Our marketing strategy in the initial stage is to promote features of the AI system service to more consumers,” Park said. To this end, the company said it will offer a 60 percent discount of the NUGU device for those who purchase it before the end of October. A NUGU device has been priced at 249,000 won ($223.28) and the AI assistant service is offered free of charge, the company said.