S.Korea's Upstage to add AI chatbot AskUp to Japanese messaging app Line

South Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) tech company Upstage on Friday said it will install its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot AskUp on the Japanese messaging app Line.

Line users simply need to add AskUp as a friend without authentication, with all of the chatbot's functions in KakaoTalk equally usable on Line. They can also use 100 GPT-3.5 and 10 GPT-4 messages per day free just like in South Korea.

AskUp has AI optical character recognition (OCR) technology developed by Upstage, making it easy to use in both English and Japanese.

In South Korea, OCR can process documents ranging from learning materials to business registration certificates and contracts, gaining fame as "ChatGPT with eyes."

With AskUp's installation on Line, sending a text document or hand-drawn image to the chatbot results in an immediate response with the translated content in the messenger. Upstage said it expects high utility from AskUp in regions where document digitization is required like Japan and Southeast Asia, two areas where Line is most popular.

Upstage can detect user intent and emotion by applying prompt- and fine-tuning technology to AskUp. Line users can also hold optimized conversations in Japanese.

Using GPT-4, AskUp can utilize knowledge in 27 languages including Korean and Japanese and a range of fields.

Upstage is poised to accelerate its global expansion by adding AskUp to Line. Starting with Japan, the company will gradually expand its service to countries with many Line users such as Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia.

"AskUp seeks rebirth as a global platform," Upstage CEO Kim Seong-hoon said. "We will strive to allow more people to experience convenient and innovative AI."

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com