Kakao's new AI assistant can reorder your groceries, manage schedules from chats

Kakao will release an AI assistant inside its messenger app that helps users manage schedules arranged in chats and buy products.

The move is part of Kakao’s push to bring AI into KakaoTalk, which has about 50 million users. Kakao added OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the app last year under a partnership with the U.S. company.

“We are building the optimal experience for each individual with agentic AI services,” Kakao CEO Chung Shin-a said at ifkakao26, this year's edition of the company's annual conference, in Yongin, Gyeonggi, on Tuesday.

The service, called Kanana Space, can be called up anywhere in KakaoTalk with a two-finger swipe. Users can ask it by voice or text to send messages, manage schedules, search the web and change KakaoTalk settings. Kakao’s mascot Ryan will be the first character to serve as the assistant, followed by other characters from the company’s intellectual property.

In a demo, a user asked the assistant to reorder what they had bought the previous week, without saying what it was. The assistant searched the user’s chats, identified bottled water in a brand the user regularly orders, applied available coupons and prepared the order through to payment.

Kakao said this works because it also runs its own e-commerce and e-wallet platforms. The assistant can also pull up requests that other people have made to the user in their chats. Users still have to approve final actions such as sending messages or making payments.

A closed beta will begin in December, and Kakao plans to launch the service next year.

Kakao is also building AI models to support it. Under its Kanana line, simple requests go to smaller models, including ones that run directly on the smartphone making the request, while harder tasks go to larger server-based models. A system called AI Conductor picks the model and tools for each request to keep costs down. Among the models developed in-house is Kanana-o, a multimodal model that understands text, images and voice and responds by voice.

Kakao is also developing Kanana Live, a technology that listens and speaks at the same time, which it used in a demo of real-time Korean-to-English interpretation. It will also offer Kanvas, a PC service for building and running personal agents, with a closed beta as early as this year.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [[email protected]]