Seoul to launch AI chatbot service for foreign visitors' tour planning

Seoul city government is in talks with tech firms including Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Naver Corp. to provide foreigners with artificial intelligence-powered chatbot services in their respective languages next year, in order to plan tours in the capital of South Korea.

Seoul Tour Organization, a state-backed tourism foundation, said Wednesday that it will offer such services on its travel guide website Visit Seoul via a collaboration with a generative AI service provider.

The website already provides tour information in Korean and six other languages – English, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian and Russian – which are spoken by a majority of foreign visitors to Seoul. With AI chatbots, the website will serve dozens of languages to offer customized travel plans, reflecting real-time information on the tourist locations.

The tourism foundation is in talks with Google, Microsoft, Naver and AI startups to launch the service and will select candidates for testing soon. After completion of the test by the end of this year, it will start the chatbot services next year.

Google sees the new AI service project as a great opportunity to use its large language model (LLM), which is trained on a massive amount of data to generate and translate text, according to industry sources. The company believes that Seoul is one of the best testbeds for its generative AI as the city is at the leading edge of information technology and culturally open, sources added.

The global tech giant in May chose Korean and Japanese for the first non-English version of Bard, its generative AI chatbot, as they are helpful in developing services in other languages, its CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time.  

Naver is pitching that its domestic servers comply with cloud computing service guidelines for the state-owned organization and have an unparalleled scale in terms of Korean language database. The local online platform giant debuted its upgraded LLM HyperCLOVA X in August and is providing a beta service of its conversational AI solution.

Write to Sang-Eun Lee and Hae-Ryon Choi at selee@hankyung.com

Jihyun Kim edited this article.