Giving Medicine and Shopping Together... 'HyperCLOVA' Penetrating Daily Life

Naver's Super Large AI
Trained on 3 Years of News and 19 Years of Blogs
Initiates Conversations with People First

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Hyun-sook Park (75, pseudonym), who lives in Busan, looks forward to Wednesdays every week. With limited mobility and no nearby friends, Wednesdays bring a companion’s phone call to her. When the phone rings, the voice on the other end warmly asks Park if she slept well and if she took her medicine properly. The voice on the phone is from Naver’s hyper-large artificial intelligence (AI) technology ‘HyperCLOVA,’ applied in the ‘CLOVA Care Call’ service.

AI Initiates Conversation

HyperCLOVA is a hyper-large AI composed of a total of 204 billion parameters, trained on 50 years of Naver news and 9 years of Naver blogs. This surpasses the 175 billion parameters of OpenAI’s hyper-large AI ‘GPT-3.’

HyperCLOVA goes beyond shopping and search by directly initiating conversations and responding to people. A representative service is the AI call service ‘CLOVA Care Call’ for elderly people living alone and middle-aged single-person households. When answering a call on the phone for a trial, a female voice asks, “Are you Mr. Seungjin Lee?” Upon answering yes, it continues, “Did you sleep well last night?” When the reply is that sleep was not good, it responds, “I hope you sleep well today.” The call lasts about five minutes, and when there is nothing more to say, it prompts new questions to encourage conversation. However, if answers are unrelated to the Care Call’s questions or if questions are asked back, communication is still not smooth.

Care Call began beta service in November last year in Haeundae-gu, Busan, and is currently operating in over 20 local governments (city, county, district level) nationwide, including Seoul, Incheon, and Daegu. A satisfaction survey of users showed that over 90% felt comforted by the service.

Naver plans to enhance the service by introducing a feature in the third quarter of this year that extracts information requiring continuous management from AI-user conversations and utilizes it in subsequent dialogues. This method allows the AI to remember past conversations and continue the dialogue.

Hyper-Large AI Entering Our Daily Lives

The service where HyperCLOVA’s technology is currently applied most diversely is Naver Shopping. The product exhibitions on Naver Shopping are automatically generated by AI, not by shopping planners. The AI handles all processes of exhibition composition, from theme selection to title writing and product selection. HyperCLOVA is also applied throughout services such as ‘AI Review Summary,’ which converts product reviews into natural sentences and summarizes them, and the personalized product recommendation service ‘For You.’ HyperCLOVA’s technology is also embedded in the search function, correcting typos or spelling mistakes entered by users.

Jung Seok-geun, CEO of Naver CLOVA CIC, said, “Naver is the first to apply hyper-large AI to AI speakers,” adding, “While AI speakers have mainly received ‘commands’ until now, it will now be possible to have experiences like natural ‘conversations.’” He continued, “Going forward, Naver will lead the normalization of HyperCLOVA technology in daily life and develop the CLOVA AI speaker into a ‘family assistant’ that makes life more convenient for all family members.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.