Naver launches conversational search engine service 

South Korea’s internet juggernaut Naver Corp. announced Friday it has launched a conversational search engine service called Knowledge Interactive.

The new service was built using the company’s own hyperscale artificial intelligence HyperClova and the AiRSearch technology released on Oct. 28 last year. 

This is how the conversational search engine works.

A user might ask: “Tyrannosaurus, what are your favorite foods?” The Knowledge Interactive could answer: “I usually eat plant-eating dinosaurs. In fact, you can find my teeth marks in the bones of many herbivorous dinosaurs. “

Naver said that while existing chatbots answer questions by memorizing a set amount of answers, “The Knowledge Interactive can engage in Q&As in a broader scope because its model does more than just learn from a given set of answers.”

The Knowledge Interactive identifies the intention behind a user’s questions and finds appropriate answers from verified sources. It will then extract the supporting documents and phrases and launch its own investigation to make sure the findings are indeed relevant to the questions. 

The engine will provide supporting evidence as reference data to allow the user to refer to the data and explore the subject further. 

Naver is also allowing the search results to be visualized as three-dimensional models. 

After searching for a tyrannosaurus and ordering it to “walk” or “run,” the resulting image will perform the motions as told. There is also a function to delve deeper into the results through Augmented Reality technology and communicate with the life-like imagery. 

The Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province-based company will begin by providing such services vis-a-vis a number of popular dinosaurs and gradually expand it to encompass other results. 

Dustin Hyun, who leads the search engine arm of Naver said, “We hope to bring color to the current search engine experience with the all-new AI-powered Knowledge Interactive.”

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.