Domestic companies are preparing chatbot services for everything from consultations to orders and reservations.
Interest is growing as messenger use increases over social media.

On your busy commute, text KakaoTalk with "Tell me today's weather" or "Tell me when the bus is coming." It will provide hourly weather updates and real-time bus arrival information. Information that used to require searching through apps is now accessible with a simple text input on Messenger.

Chatbot is a combination of the words chatting and robot, and is a conversational interface that operates in messenger environments (KakaoTalk, Line, etc.), and chatbot services are expanding.

In overseas countries where companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are already operating AI chatbot services, they are helping with everything from simple conversations to weather information, movie ticket purchase information, real-time road information, and even shopping.

Interest in chatbots is heating up in Korea as the number of companies and organizations introducing chatbot services is increasing one by one this year.


Daishin Securities, which introduced the chatbot 'Benjamin' on the 20th, has created a system that allows customers to easily consult by digitizing frequently asked questions and answers. Daegu City also unveiled "Ddubot," a service that handles passport-related inquiries, earlier this month. "Busan Moa," which provides information about Busan, has been available on KakaoTalk and Facebook Messenger since last year.

Recently, Naver added a chatbot feature called "TokTok" to its existing shopping site to assist customers with their shopping. Furthermore, financial institutions like Nonghyup, Dongbu Insurance, and Lina Life Insurance are using chatbots for consultations, and Money Brain is preparing to launch "YamYam," which will handle delivery orders. This expansion of corporate chatbot adoption, encompassing everything from consultations to ordering and reservations, is another recent trend.

Is it possible to have a free conversation with artificial intelligence?

A chatbot can be thought of as a human-to-machine conversation that uses messengers to facilitate human-to-human conversations. Simply put, it's like having a conversation between your iPhone's Siri and a messenger.

Interest in chatbots began as more people around the world used messengers than social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The terms "gantalk" (personal KakaoTalk) and "dantalk" (group KakaoTalk) have become commonplace, demonstrating the familiarity of messengers. Furthermore, mobile users' reluctance to install new apps has fueled their rapid growth.

So how do current chatbot conversations unfold? There are two types of chatbot conversations: open conversations, which involve free-flowing speech without any direction, like everyday conversations, and closed conversations, which involve a pre-planned structure that prompts choices.

To speak freely, as if you were having a conversation with a friend, it's crucial to understand the intent of the question. For a machine to accurately understand the intent and provide an answer, artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary. Last year, Microsoft's AI chatbot, Tay, was shut down just 16 hours after its release. This was because Tay, having learned from some users' discriminatory comments, began using profanity and other discriminatory language. This suggests that free conversation with AI is difficult.

Conversation with machines can be primarily used in conversational commerce and O2O (on-demand) services, such as reservations and ordering; personal assistant services, such as weather information or healthcare; and public services, such as legal consultations or real estate information. Currently, the most common use cases are consulting, reservation, and ordering services.

Park Jeong-nam, CEO of GentlePie, a chatbot developer, said, "The purpose of a chatbot isn't to have good conversations. It's about getting people to use the bot, what kind of conversations they have with it, and what kind of results they lead to." He emphasized that the bot should be planned according to business objectives.


At a chatbot planning and development case study seminar held on the 27th, Infrabank CEO Kim Min-yeol presented examples of how chatbots have been applied in the healthcare sector. He stated that the most suitable industries for chatbots include e-commerce, content, and healthcare.

Vitus, a healthcare widget introduced by CEO Kim Min-yeol, remotely checks patients' health and helps manage their health. This chatbot is being serviced by GSK, a British global pharmaceutical company.

Businesses that are suitable for chatbots include e-commerce, content, and healthcare.

Vitus's defining characteristic is its active and chatty nature. While typical chatbots are passive, responding only after being spoken to, Vitus initiates conversations based on timely greetings and individual activity and sleep data. Furthermore, it can communicate 24 hours a day. Leveraging this capability, the company is developing an e-commerce chatbot in Korea. It aims to provide consumers with information on health supplements they desire, recommend products, and provide links to online shopping malls and payment buttons for purchase.

CEO Kim plans to implement text input and multiple responses in the upcoming Chatbot 2.0 upgrade. The Black Consumer issue that caused problems during Chatbot 1.0 testing allowed him to identify and improve the issue. Questions the chatbot couldn't answer caused errors and malfunctions. To address this, Chatbot 2.0 includes an age option. Users in their 20s and 30s are more adept at text input, so they can use text input. Users in their 40s and older will be limited to multiple responses. He anticipates that this approach will broaden the user base.

He said, “A chatbot is something that allows humans to have conversations with 100 experts that they would not normally have access to,” and “A chatbot is not something that you use once a year. “Requiring users to download an app to use a chatbot is a business-centric, not user-centric, approach,” he said, pointing out a problem in the domestic chatbot market.

It will continue to get smarter this year, but AI won't be introduced.

General-purpose chatbots, such as those currently used by Facebook and Google for call centers and Q&A, are being launched in the domestic market as well. However, they are being released in-app rather than messenger-based, thus diminishing the advantage of chatbots that eliminate the need for app downloads.

Despite these challenges, chatbots are expected to undergo a transitional period last year and reach full-scale growth in 2017. While chatbots are expected to continue to become smarter this year, the industry predicts that full-scale adoption of artificial intelligence will not occur.

Gentle Pie CEO Park predicted, “The chatbot platform’s service area will expand into various fields related to individual user experiences, such as shopping and fitness, and along with the growth of corporate messengers, it will greatly contribute to improving the productivity and efficiency of internal work.”