Brity launches Avril, competition for dominance intensifies
Focusing on customized services and convenience for businesses

With Samsung SDS and SK C&C successively unveiling enterprise AI platform services, competition to gain a foothold in the B2B market is expected to intensify.

Samsung SDS held a media briefing on the 5th and unveiled its conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform, 'Brity'.

Brity is an intelligent service that supports or performs tasks requested by corporate customers through natural language. The strategy is to target the B2B artificial intelligence market by completing three major AI platforms, including Brightics AI, an analytical AI announced last June that performs pattern recognition and result prediction by analyzing numerical or log data, and visual AI that performs object recognition and scene understanding by analyzing images or videos.

The most significant feature of Brity is its ability to perform natural language understanding, reasoning, and learning to process tasks requested by users. When a question is received, the conversational engine extracts keywords during the natural language understanding stage. It then analyzes the conversational context through classification and connects with legacy systems to match the optimal response. An important part of this stage is natural language comprehension and grasping the conversational context.

Lee Chi-hoon, Senior Vice President and Head of the AI Research Team at Samsung SDS, explained, “We focused on grasping complex sentences and conversational contexts. In call center consultations, questions are often asked with complex intentions, and topic shifts occur easily. Britie is equipped with technology that finds the optimal value on its own within the conversation, so unlike existing AI models that required inputting words or conversation examples, it evolves autonomously through dialogue.”
Samsung SDS completed performance verification for its employees starting in May of this year. It enabled the use of various information services necessary within the company, such as schedules, phone numbers, business trips, and meal menus, through its internal messenger.

Kim Jong-pil, Head of Development Center at Samsung SDS (Senior Vice President), explained, “The response structure of Brity and Bixby is configured identically. However, the only difference is that Bixby targets the B2C market and handles general data, whereas Brity targets the B2B market and handles specific data.”

SK C&C announced the launch of 'April,' an AI service based on the Korean Application Programming Interface (API) of IBM's artificial intelligence platform, 'Watson.' It unveiled eight APIs, including conversational services, search and evaluation, image recognition, natural language classification, document conversion, natural language understanding, language translation, and sentiment analysis.

“We determined that IBM’s Watson is the AI closest to commercialization, so we began the Korean localization work last May,” said Ahn Jung-ok, Business Representative at SK Corporation. “Although Avril is not yet perfect, we are developing and establishing use cases in various industrial fields such as healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals, education, services, distribution, and manufacturing.” "The ultimate goal is to build an AI ecosystem with various partners," he stated.


On the 6th, SK Corporation held the 'Avril Opening Day' to introduce the Avril service and showcase various customer cases including Korea University, AIA Life, Doosan Information & Communication, Mohitalk, Susang ST, and Hansol Inticube.

Lee Jong-min, Senior Vice President of Hansol Inticube, explained the reason for selecting the Avril service, stating, “When we assessed whether it provides natural language-based APIs capable of supporting various industries evenly, whether its utility has been verified globally, and whether data security and service continuity are ensured, Avril was the most suitable,” mentioning that the decision was made from three perspectives.

Avril focuses on convenience so that even non-experts can use it simply by familiarizing themselves with its usage. All you have to do is visit the Avril website, select the APIs needed for your desired service, and combine them like assembling building blocks. It also supports various document formats, including HTML, PDF, and MS Word.

In addition to the eight APIs introduced this time, we plan to introduce additional STT (speech to text) APIs that automatically convert speech to text and TTS (text to speech) APIs that automatically convert text to speech in the fourth quarter.