During the Mobile World Congress (MWC) on Wednesday, Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa announced that the company will partner with Sony and LG to develop its own voice-based assistant, named Clova.
Clova is being developed in partnership with the South Korea’s biggest internet portal Naver Corporation and will be available as a mobile application and a speaker named ‘Wave’ in South Korea and Japan in early summer. “The Clova platform allows Line’s existing services to interconnect, moving users post-touch, post-display, and even post-smart portal, into a new future. We are aiming to make Clova Asia’s leading cloud AI platform.” said Idezawa.
With IOT being the next thing in consumer technology, Line has initiated a step to develop devices beyond smartphones. Takeshi Idezawa outlined the company’s interest in creating a voice-based assistant to compete with the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Home.
Just like Alexa and Siri, Line’s smart assistant Clova is capable of voice interaction, setting alarms, playing audiobooks, offering weather report, music playback, enabling to-do-list, and other real-time information. In fact, the company is expecting a home court advantage over Google and other platforms, when it comes to knowledge of Asia.
2016 was a great year for smart assistants. Google has launched its Assistant artificial intelligence for its Pixel smartphones and made it available to other google lines of smartphones. On the other hand, Amazon Alexa has been in the industry for more than two years and sold up to 2 million devices worldwide. With this new venture, the Japanese-owned chatting app can whip hand the Asian market, which is in its earlier stages of adopting voice-based smart devices.
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