AI One Team Unveils Four Joint R&D Achievements
Plans to apply to KT and Hyundai Heavy Industries Group businesses


AI One Team (KT, Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, LG Electronics, LG U+, Korea Investment & Securities, Dongwon Group, KAIST, Hanyang University, ETRI) has released its first R&D results in about 10 months.

KT announced on the 7th that the AI One Team's first joint R&D achievement was the successful development of four AI technologies. The AI One Team plans to immediately apply these newly developed AI technologies and solutions to industrial settings, establishing a "data utilization-AI technology development-commercialization-industry problem solving" structure.

The developed technologies include ▲deep learning speech synthesis ▲end-to-end speech recognition ▲moving picture ▲AI-based robot fault diagnosis technology. Three of the results will be utilized in KT's business, and one will be applied to the Hyundai Heavy Industries Group's industrial sites.

Personalized Text-To-Speech (P-TTS) technology , developed by KT and Professor Kim Hoe-rin of KAIST, reduces costs to a quarter of existing voice synthesis methods and increases speed by approximately tenfold. The speed was improved by restructuring the system to generate voices simultaneously, rather than sequentially. KT plans to commercialize the technology in the first quarter of this year and utilize it in AI contact centers and Giga Genie.

The E2E (End-to-End) speech recognition technology was developed by KT and Professor Jang Jun-hyeok of Hanyang University. It improves recognition accuracy and allows domain expansion with a small amount of training data. Using technologies such as specification augmentation and data augmentation, the word error rate (WER) is approximately 7% lower than existing hybrid methods. KT plans to utilize this technology to improve free-speech speech recognition rates.

The Moving Picture solution is an AI technology that converts images into videos, developed by KT and Professor Kim Tae-hyun of Hanyang University. It applies motion effects to images and transforms them into videos. It utilizes cutting-edge AI technologies such as image segmentation, object detection, motion estimation, and super-resolution image restoration (inpainting).

KT plans to utilize this moving picture solution in a variety of fields, including IPTV, posters, webtoons, and animated advertisements. The core technology behind the moving picture solution has already secured two domestic patents, and is currently under review for publication in the international academic journal IEEE Access.

AI-based robot fault diagnosis technology was developed by Hyundai Heavy Industries Group and Professor Jang Jun-hyeok of Hanyang University. This technology uses AI to diagnose faults in industrial robots, and can detect abnormalities in reducers by applying voice processing and deep learning technologies to vibration signals.

Hyundai Heavy Industries Group expects that by applying this technology, which can be applied regardless of operating conditions and improves diagnostic accuracy by resolving data imbalances between normal and faulty states, to various robot products, it will be able to maximize the maintenance efficiency of automated lines.

Since its launch, AI One Team has formed an "AI Guru Group" of approximately 40 domestic AI experts and has been discussing challenges facing the industry through a meeting mechanism called the "Round Table." To date, over 70 roundtable meetings have been held, addressing approximately 30 topics and leading to 11 research and development projects.

This year, the AI One Team plans to pursue seven additional projects in various fields, including AI robotics, in addition to the four projects previously announced, and to continue its efforts to drive AI innovation.

◇ AI One Team: Solving Social Problems, Developing Business Models, and Developing Talent

The AI One Team is also collaborating to address social issues using AI. KAIST participated in the "COVID-19 Spread Prediction Research Alliance," launched by KT in March of last year, and achieved joint research results, including predicting the risk of infectious disease inflow from overseas and predicting areas of domestic spread. Furthermore, in June of last year, LG Electronics and LG U+ joined the effort to further develop infectious disease spread prevention models and collaborate on application strategies.

Business cooperation between participating companies is also being discussed, and the company has successfully linked smart home appliances using KT Giga Genie Home IoT and LG Electronics ThinQ Home. Additionally, we have discovered an additional collaborative item that applies the control function of Giga Genie Inside to LG Electronics' TONE Free wireless earphones.

We are also collaborating to cultivate AI experts. AI One Team began developing AI talent for corporate practice with the KT-Korea Investment & Securities program late last year, and plans to expand its portfolio of AI training programs across industries.