Naver Labs, the research subsidiary of South Korean search giant Naver, has opened the patent and design for its robotic cart, dubbed AIRCART, the company announced. Third-party developers will be able to use an open kit provided by the firm sometime within the first half of next year to create related robotic products, the company said. The kit will have the source code, circuit design board, and user guide for the patents. AIRCART is an electronic cart with physical human-robot interaction technology applied that augments strength. A strength sensor on the handle reads the user's intention and controls power and direction, and the user can then move heavy items with little exertion.

Over the past year or so, earbuds with translation tech have been popping up everywhere, signaling the evolution of an industry. Headphones are now capable of being more than just a means to deliver music -- if the tech is good enough, they can act as a bridge between disparate cultures, bringing people together to foster mutual understandings. The new Bluetooth-enabled Mars wireless earbuds, a collaborative project from Line Corporation and Naver Corporation (a leading internet provider in Korea and Line's parent company), aim to do just that. Boasting real-time ear-to-ear translation of 10 different languages, Mars is unique in that it is designed for each person to wear one earbud (as opposed to needing two pairs). The earbuds were named a CES 2018 Best of Innovation Honoree at CES Unveiled New York on Thursday, November 9. Scheduled for release in early 2018, Mars support Line's Clova artificial intelligence, a virtual assistant which takes cues from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Major tech firms have been keen to sell speakers equipped with voice-based artificial intelligence agents recently. The debuts of smart speakers are seen as the prelude to an AI era, ushering in a new technological age in which virtual assistants are expected to become as ubiquitous as the smartphone, allowing people to connect to the internet by voice with greater ease. Whether these speakers will really take off and whether the technology will be popular in Japan remain to be seen. The following are answers to these questions as well as why AI speakers are creating a buzz and what will be the role of Japanese firms in this field. What makes AI speakers special?

Line Corp. said Thursday it plans to focus more on artificial intelligence, saying AI-related services will be the next big thing after the smartphone boom. "Because of the smartphone trend, Line was born and we have grown this far. But looking at five or 10 years from now, what comes after the smartphone era? It's the era of AI," said Jun Masuda, Line's chief strategy and marketing officer, at a news conference in Tokyo, where the company disclosed its strategy going forward. The Tokyo-based messaging-app giant said the new core service it is developing will be called Clova, an internet-based AI system or "virtual assistant."

Line Corp. is the most popular app in Japan--and #TalkingTech pays a visit to find out why it's so popular. TOKYO -- Imagine a world where everyone you know is on the same social network, sending direct messages to one another, sharing photos and making free phone calls. And it's not called Facebook. In Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, that social network/messenger app is probably Line, an app that's available in the United States and most other countries, but dominant in Asia, where over two-thirds of its audience is based. At 214 million monthly active users, Line is dwarfed in size by the Facebook social network and the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp chat applications, which each have over 1 billion users.

Naver and LINE Corp. unveiled their artificial intelligence (AI)-based assistant platform Clova at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 in Barcelona, the companies reported Thursday. According to Naver and its mobile service subsidiary, Clova, which stands for "cloud virtual assistant," aims at an AI platform that works based on the five human senses. "Clova is a platform that incorporates various AI technologies including vocal, visual and conversational engines," LINE Corp. CEO Idezawa Takeshi said in his keynote at the MWC 2017, Wednesday. The two companies are jointly developing Clova by improving Naver Labs' voice-recognizing assistant service AMICA. They said it will expand the system to have more cognitive capabilities to make it more humanlike.

Japanese-based messaging app Line is wildly popular in other parts of the world and the company has even expanded from a simple chat app to a full-service mobile carrier. According to a new report from the Financial Times, Line is branching out again and developing its own digital assistant called Clova to compete with the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant, complete with its own line of smart speakers. Clova isn't scheduled for release until sometime in "early summer" of this year, but Line views the platform, which is being developed with help from Sony and LG, as the next logical step for its messaging service. The platform will include the sort of features you might expect from a digital assistance in 2017 -- like easy access to news, weather, calendars and online purchases -- but Line is also promising Clova will be able to handle "complicated questions" and include a facial recognition aspect similar to Apple's rumored iPhone features. Outside of phones, Clova is designed to work in third-party apps and hardware, but the first devices to support it will be a standalone Clova app, a smart speaker called Wave and a "smart display" called Face.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the current big thing in the ever-evolving world of technology and it now seems the popular messaging app Line wants a piece of the action as well. Following in the footsteps of Apple with Siri, Amazon with Alexa, and Google with the Google Assistant – which on a side note is now in the process of being rolled out to more devices. According to the information coming through, the Japanese messaging company's AI will be called'Clova' and is likely designed to be included in devices from LG Electronics and Sony. The new AI will have all the features one might expect with a virtual assistant, including the ability to pull weather and news, stream music, or update agendas. Likewise, this AI will reportedly make use of a now-typical use of speech recognition and an ability to understand natural language. Although, it is suggested that the team behind Clova also wants to include face recognition, as well as the ability to understand difficult questions.

It's not a stretch to say we'll all be speaking to AI-powered digital assistants in the future. But who will build the assistants we use the most? Till now that battle has been waged by tech giants in e-commerce, search and mobile hardware, through Amazon's Alexa, Google Now and Apple's Siri. Now a popular chat app in Asia is throwing its hat into the ring. LINE, the messaging app owned by South Korea's Naver and with 700 million registered users, wants to take a step beyond smartphones and towards screen-less technology, the company's chief executive, Takeshi Idezawa said at Mobile World Congress (MWC) on Wednesday, with its own digital assistant powered by machine learning. Moving past the smartphone screen is a wise strategy for any tech company these days, even those who were born on mobile.