[AI Revolution](40) AI Technology That Sees, Hears, Understands, and Speaks Like Humans

There is an artificial intelligence (AI) company recognized by SK Telecom and Korea Aerospace Industries. It is Conan Technology, which possesses AI technology that can see, hear, understand, and speak like a human.

Conan Technology is an AI software specialist company established in 1999. Among companies providing AI services with proprietary technology, it has the longest history. Youngseom Kim, CEO of Conan Technology, founded the company with colleagues after seeing the potential of data processing and information retrieval business while studying at the Korean language information processing study club 'KONAN (Korean Natural Language Analysis)' during his time as a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI).

The strength of Conan Technology lies in its in-house development and possession of core AI technologies that recognize text, voice, and images. They developed AI capable of interpreting the meaning of conversations made up of sentences or speech and understanding the speaker’s intent to enable dialogue. Using this, they created software such as search engines and chatbots.

The initial business model was a natural language processing-based search engine. They developed technology to analyze unstructured data without a fixed format and created search engines for Empas (2001) and SK Communications (2006?2007). Subsequently, they applied deep learning technology to natural language and big data processing technologies to advance their services to analyze data more deeply.

Konan Technology participated as SKT's AI partner at MWC23, which opens in February in Barcelona, Spain. The photo shows SKT's MWC23 exhibition booth. (Photo by Konan Technology)

The main services include the search engine service 'Conan Search' that processes natural language to find results, 'Conan Analytics' which derives insights through unstructured text data analysis, the online market analysis service 'pulseK', conversational natural language understanding 'Conan Chatbot', deep learning-based video analysis service 'Conan Watcher', speech recognition-based subtitle generation service 'Conan Listener', AI voice actor 'Conan Voice', and the 'Conan Digital Twin Framework' applicable to the aerospace defense industry. As of last year, Conan Search accounted for 55% of total sales.

Last year’s sales amounted to 15.4 billion KRW. The proportion of Conan Search in total sales was 51.5%. Conan Analytics (14%), Conan Watcher (12%), and Conan Chatbot (5%) also contributed to sales. They have secured about 2,500 clients ranging from large corporations such as Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor Company to government ministries including the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Since establishment, they have completed over 3,000 projects. More than half of their clients have been long-term customers for over five years, demonstrating high customer loyalty.

Large corporations quickly made investments seeing Conan Technology’s growth potential. SK Telecom holds a 20.77% stake, becoming the second-largest shareholder. The third-largest shareholder is Korea Aerospace Industries with a 7.82% stake. The company is also participating in the advancement of SK Telecom’s AI assistant service ‘A.Dot’. Together with Korea Aerospace Industries, they are jointly developing projects related to defense and security through AI video analysis technology. Additionally, based on their proprietary AI technology, the company plans to expand its business areas to metaverse, entertainment, space, drones, and robotics.

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