KT aims to transform from telecom company into AI company

“The Little Mermaid lived with her father, the Sea King, and her five older sisters,” as a user started to read a sentence from an English children’s book, an artificial intelligence (AI) speaker automatically read the rest of the book in the user’s voice. When a user said, “Genie, make a reservation at the Novotel restaurant for Saturday at six o’clock,” the AI speaker responded, “I have reserved your preferred seat by the window.” An AI robot brought a can of beer when a user gave a command by saying, “I want to have a beer while watching baseball.”

Those were part of the AI services demonstrated by KT at the KT Square in Seoul on Wednesday. The telecommunications company revealed some 20 AI-related original technologies on Wednesday and announced its plan to transform into an “AI company.” It also presented its goals of investing 300 billion won and securing 1,000 specialists in the next four years as well as increasing the number of devices that adopt KT’s AI technology to 100 million by 2025.

KT has divided its AI business into four sectionsㅡGlobal export, Industry, Office, and Future generationㅡas part of its AI business expansion drive. For starters, the company plans to apply its AI platform “Giga Genie” at a hotel in Cebu, the Philippines in November and provide technology consulting to Russia’s top telecommunications company MTS. To target industries, KT will apply AI services in the fields of factory, security, and energy as well as in 5G smart factories. In addition, repetitive works, such as taking minutes or sorting out defective products will be replaced by AI thanks to its “AI support service at work.” KT also plans to release AI coding education package called “AI Edu Pack.”

The 20 original technologies demonstrated on Wednesday include: “English Personalization Voice Learning,” where an AI speaker automatically reads an English text in the user’s voice after listening to the user reading a sentence from the text; “Speech Separation” technology that automatically distinguishes multiple users’ voices; and “3D Avatar” that projects video onto a moving object with the help of the “Giga Beam” technology. “Our goal is to place KT AI technology everywhere our customers are,” said Lee Pil-jae, head of the Marketing Department at KT.


Tae-Ho Hwang taeho@donga.com · Do-Young Kwak now@donga.com