AskUp aims to make life more convenient, even with highball recipes

Amid the generative artificial intelligence technology sensation, businesses scramble to get creative in using AI to bolster their sales, and a South Korean convenience store operator has led the pack by launching “the world’s first” AI merchandiser-developed highball drink.

GS25, Korea’s largest convenience store chain, on Tuesday rolled out AskUp Lemon Sparkle Highball, a new whisky cocktail drink developed jointly with local brewery Brewguru.

“This is the world’s first alcoholic beverage developed by AI,” said Han Gu-jong, an MD at GS25’s liquor sale division.

The new alcoholic drink was developed based on a series of conversations with AskUp, a ChatGPT-powered Korean chatbot operated by Korean AI technology startup Upstage, according to GS25.

Human product designers asked AskUp a myriad of questions such as “What is the best highball recipe?” or “What is the best can design for highballs?” to come up with AskUp Lemon Sparkle Highball, GS25 said.  

The Korean retailer pins high hopes on the AI-designed highball to woo consumers in their 20s and 30s who are “digital natives” and leading Korea’s canned whisky highball boom.

ASKUP AS AI MD  

AskUp’s developer Upstage also vowed to seek similar collaboration projects with other businesses using its AI technology after it showed off the highball drink to audiences at the Korean AI startup’s first-ever press conference held in Seoul on Tuesday.

“Our company’s goal is to liberate the world and make human life more convenient with AI,” Upstage Chief Executive Officer Kim Seong-hoon said at the press conference.

Upstage was founded in 2020 by Kim who led the development of Naver Corp.’s AI platform CLOVA and other former AI engineers of not only Naver and Kakao Corp. but also US Big Tech companies including Meta, Nvidia and Amazon.

Its chatbot AskUp powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and optical character recognition (OCR) technology was first launched in March on Kakao messenger KakaoTalk.

At the news conference, Kim said AskUp will gradually reduce its technology reliance on ChatGPT, which currently stands at about 70%.

“We plan to develop high-performance AI technology that can be used by everyone, both the general public and the business sector,” said Kim.

AskUp has already secured about 1 million subscribers since its launch, the company said.

DOCUMENT AI PACK, ASKUP SEARGEST

Upstage also unveiled two new AI programs, Document AI Pack and AskUp Seargest.

Document AI Pack is powered by OCR technology, which enables the conversion of images or PDF documents into text, and natural language processing technology that can analyze and summarize the converted text.

Thanks to its fine-tuned OCR technology, the new AI pack's image recognition rate has improved to 96%, as seen in a case of reading a medical bill, Kim said.

AskUp Seargest is an upgrade to AskUp, with the addition of an up-to-date information search engine and personalization AI technology.

Upstage said this new chatbot is more reliable than others, avoiding hallucinations.

GOING GLOBAL

With more advancement in its own large language and multimodal language models, Upstage will strive to foray into overseas markets.

AskUp has already made inroads into Japan and Southeast Asia after it was added to Naver’s Line messenger early this month, the company said. It is currently seeking to cooperate with major companies in the US, Kim added.

Upstage is expected to reach the breakeven point by the end of next year after already winning 5 billion won ($3.7 million) in orders for its AI packs from clients in the financial, manufacturing and information technology industries by April, according to Upstage CEO. The company sold 6 billion won worth of AI programs last year.

The Korean startup last month topped the four categories at the International Association for Pattern Recognition’s International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) in San Jose, California last month.

Write to Kyeong-je Han at hankyung@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.