Earlier this week, South Korea’s Naver Corporation announced its newfound collaboration with US-based chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. The company teamed up with Qualcomm in order to facilitate the development and distribution of its AI (artificial intelligence) platform Clova. The collaboration between the two tech giants will allow Naver and its Japanese arm Line Corporation to push the Clova AI platform onto virtually any device powered by Qualcomm’s IoT (Internet of Things) chipsets.
Qualcomm is one of the world’s largest IoT chipset providers, with over one billion devices currently on the market relying on the company’s IoT silicon. Having said that, Naver Corporation’s partnership with the chipmaker will technically allow any device manufacturer employing Qualcomm’s IoT solutions to choose Clova as their main AI platform if they so desire. According to a Naver official quoted by BusinessKorea, the company expects that the combination of its AI platform and Qualcomm’s IoT-enabled system-on-chips will become “the reference model for AI device development,” adding that Clova can breathe life in a variety of AI-enabled products, including smart speakers. Earlier in March, it was said that Clova AI will debut on the so-called WAVE speaker designed to fit in the same category as products including Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers and the Google Home. The WAVE speaker powered by Clova has yet to be released; however, Naver Clova AI already made an appearance in the form of an app on the Google Play Store.
As to what Clova AI has to offer, the platform was apparently designed to eliminate the need for touch input and thus it can be controlled solely through voice commands. As most other AI solutions, Clova is able to stream music, search for news, provide users with information regarding weather, sports results, and more, and can act as a virtual assistant able to update the user’s calendar and perform other tasks. According to earlier reports, Clova was also designed to understand difficult questions and could employ facial recognition technologies on certain hardware, though such functionality has yet to be commercialized. More details on the availability of Clova AI on Qualcomm-powered devices should follow in the coming months.