THE KOREA ECONOMIC DAILY, GLOBAL EDITION

South Korea’s platform giant Kakao Corp. will roll out Kanana, a conversational AI agent-integrated messenger app, in the first half of next year in a push to catch up to its rivals at home and abroad in the 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 testing 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.

Like KakaoTalk, only invited friends can have conversations on Kanana.

“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.

Kakao’s new AI messenger service centering around more user-friendly services underscores its differing AI focus from 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 its 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 a 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 to be used for the company’s other mainstay AI models and new AI services.

Kakao is currently developing various LLMs, multimodal LLMs and image-generating AI models and will introduce language models by size 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 of last year.

In May this year, Kakao merged with its AI R&D subsidiary Kakao Brain to put 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.

The market’s response to Kakao’s various AI efforts, however, has been chilly. 

Some even raised concerns that the separate AI messenger service Kanana could cannibalize KakaoTalk.

Kakao shares dropped 5.2% to end at 37,350 won ($27.10) on Tuesday.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.