Kakao unveils in-house AI assistant ‘AI Buddy’… ‘Summarizes emails and reserves meeting rooms’

If Kakao 2024 Conference
Jeong Gyu-don, CTO, unveils ‘AI Buddy’ used within Kakao
Detects ‘system anomalies’ with Matrix AI and issues reports
Streamlines processes from data acquisition to service launch through AI platform, ‘[By Edaily Reporter Choi Jung-hee] After releasing the ‘Kanana’ AI companion app for general use on the 22nd, Kakao has unveiled an AI service aimed at fully integrating AI into how its employees work. The AI chatbot named ‘AI Buddy’ summarizes emails, books meeting rooms, and automatically sends emails with meeting schedules to participants.’,
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, “AI Agent Helping Kakao Employees, ‘AI Buddy, what’s for lunch at the cafeteria?'”,
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, ‘Jeong Gyu-don, Kakao’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), announced this at the If Kakao (ifkakao) 2024 event held at the Kakao AI campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do on the 23rd.’,
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, ‘CTO Jeong explained, “AI Buddy supports AI-based tasks by efficiently analyzing and processing various documents and data. It offers functions like summarization and commenting, integrates knowledge, and enhances search capabilities. Also, it provides easy access to tools for vacation applications, meeting room bookings, and supports an intelligent office life.”‘,
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, ‘For instance, when notifications or emails arrive in Kakao’s internal bulletin board ‘Agit’, pressing the right button brings up the ‘AI Buddy’ tool. This tool summarizes emails, searches within the emails, and extracts documents containing key terms like ‘AI’. It also allows deeper exploration of documents using the AI Buddy toolkit.’,
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, ‘If you request AI Buddy to schedule a ‘technology review meeting’, it will show available meeting rooms. Clicking on a room sends an email with meeting details to the relevant participants. This process is handled in a one-stop manner, significantly reducing the time spent on tasks. AI Buddy can also be used for simpler tasks, like asking about the lunch menu at the company cafeteria.’,
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, “CTO Jeong also elaborated on the technical principles behind AI Buddy’s operation. He said, “When a user inputs a query into the prompter, we thought a search-based generative model (RAG) could search for data or document-related information and respond accordingly, but it didn’t work very well.” AI Buddy uses multi-RAG, employing agentic RAG, graphic RAG, and function calls as needed to respond to user queries and requests. Agentic RAG refines user questions until the desired answer is obtained, graphic RAG provides data in graphic form, and function calls are utilized for meeting room bookings, vacation requests, etc.’,
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, ‘Kakao has established the ‘Kakao AI Platform (KAP)’ to streamline the process of acquiring data, refining models, conducting legal and privacy protections, and learning foundation models using graphics processing units (CPU) in a distributed learning environment, to quickly fine-tune and deploy services.’,
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, ‘CTO Jeong said, “Model developers using the KAP platform receive filtered data ensuring privacy protection through the data store, and can move to the training layer to allocate GPUs, configure a distributed environment, and train before registering their model in the model store.” He added, “Service developers can select desired models from the model catalog and apply them to their services.”’,
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, ‘Kakao is applying this to services, such as the insurance diagnosis AI service at Kakao Pay and blood sugar management service “Pasta” through Kakao Healthcare. The Pasta app uses Vision AI to photograph food and automatically calculates calories, then provides blood sugar information post-meal. Kakao Entertainment has reduced the time needed to produce webtoon short forms from several weeks to just hours with AI, and Kakao Mobility uses AI to learn geographical data in Korea for autonomous driving services.’,
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, ‘Kakao is also monitoring its systems with AI. CTO Jeong mentioned, “Kakao’s system is divided into three layers: data center, cloud infrastructure, and KakaoTalk service. Our self-developed monitoring ‘Matrix AI’ issues reports summarizing incidents, analyzing them, and proposing actions when anomalies are detected,” he continued, “allowing for preemptive measures before service disruptions occur.”’,
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, ‘CTO Jeong concluded, “Starting with AI services, next year Kakao will accelerate its application of AI. AI Buddy and others can become congenial teammates for Kakao employees. The accumulated AI knowledge and experience will transform into Kakao services.”’,
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