Kakao unveiled its recent artificial intelligence (AI) service ‘Kanana’. It was revealed that this service is a recently popular emotional voice AI chatbot.
On the developer conference if KAKAO held at Kakao headquarters in Pangyo on the twenty second, Kakao CEO Chung Shin-ah revealed Kakao’s AI model development strategy, including Canana service, and overall plans for the group’s AI services.
Just as the prevailing KakaoTalk focused on relationships and connections between users, the important thing to the Canana service is to learn users’ conversations and supply personalized answers as an AI messenger. As well as, by adding voice recognition and synthesis functions, you may send and receive messages through voice chat, and it features strengthened information security in comparison with KakaoTalk.
CEO Jeong said, “Kakao will provide AI personas that allow users to speak like friends,” and added, “Our goal is to supply a customized communication experience with AI.”
We’re currently undergoing internal testing for a service that may understand users’ emotions and remember the context of existing conversations for an extended time period, and are scheduled to be released after some functional improvements.
AI service is applied to KakaoTalk to reinforce safety and supply a ‘Shopping Mate’ function.
The AI anti-abuse system routinely detects fraudulent accounts and applies AI functions in order that users can use KakaoTalk safely. As well as, AI Commerce MD was added to KakaoTalk gifting in order that it could possibly be used as a present advice or shopping agent. AI Commerce MD said, “It can be released to general users as early as next month.”
CEO Jeong also announced plans to develop AI solutions for group corporations akin to Kakao Entertainment, Kakao Pay, and Kakao Mobility.
Particularly, they demonstrated a service that reads a desired message using a voice model that learned the voice of Ive Jang Won-young, a member of Kakao Entertainment. The plan is to develop services based on Kakao Entertainment’s K-pop IP.
When CEO Jeong asked, “Please tell me in a brilliant tone of voice that you’re feeling good about coming to Ifkakao today,” after a delay of about 6 seconds, Jang Won-young’s voice and catchphrase said, “You’re so lucky that so many individuals got here to Ifkakao.” The reply was “That’s right.”
Kakao Pay announced that it’ll use the Mixed Expert Model (MoE) method for AI financial experts. It is a method through which AI models specialized in each field, akin to real estate, tax, investment, and finance, provide comprehensive answers in response to the user’s questions.
He emphasized model orchestration and said, “We are going to comprehensively use global models, open source models, and our own models,” and “We are going to deal with user experience beyond easy benchmark competition.”

Regarding the AI model currently being developed by Kakao, he briefly mentioned, “It’s being developed in accordance with Kakao’s AI safety initiative.”
The language model is being developed into three models: ▲Flag, ▲Essence, and ▲Nano. Amongst these, “Canana Essence and Nano models can be applied to Kakao’s various services,” he said.
Along with language models, they introduced that they’re developing various AI models, including multimodal models, image generation models, and voice models, but didn’t reveal specific plans to release models.
Reporter Park Soo-bin sbin08@aitimes.com