Zalo’s virtual assistant in Vietnamese makes debut

Vietnam’s leading over-the-top (OTT) app Zalo officially launched its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant in Vietnamese, called Kiki, at the 2020 Zalo AI Summit on December 20, marking the a new stage in applying AI to the daily life of Vietnamese people.

Kiki speaker demoed at the 2020 Zalo AI Summit.
Kiki speaker demoed at the 2020 Zalo AI Summit.

At the summit, the fourth of its kind, speakers from Zalo AI Lab, AWS and JAIST focused on discussing topics concerning the application of AI to reality and how to make AI more popular with the Vietnamese people.

Sharing about the journey of developing a virtual assistant in Vietnamese, owned by the Vietnamese and serving the Vietnamese, Executive Vice President Vuong Quang Khai of VNG Corporation, which owns Zalo, said: “With its superior speed in transmitting messages compared to other input methods, natural voice is the most effective means of communication between human and computer. In the next 5-10 years, voice will become a primary tool for humans in communicating with computers.”

Directly experiencing Kiki on Maserati Levante, Tran Manh Hiep, the admin of the Tinhte.vn tech forum, said: “What I like most about Kiki is that the language is very natural, bringing the feeling of chatting with a real person without any strangeness.”

Hiep also demoed Kiki’s features for in cars, including guiding the direction, playing music and answering knowledge questions.

The 2020 Zalo AI Summit welcomed two guests from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), who have directly implemented AI in many fields of business and life. My Nguyen, a representative of AWS, shared how to operate the machine learning system, one of the important aspects of AI development.

Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, Director of JAIST’s Explainable AI Centre, shares about AI via videoconference from Japan.

Speaking via videoconference from Japan, Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, Director of JAIST’s Explainable AI Centre, touched upon the solution of using the natural language processing system to help scientists better obtain information, thus contributing to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, such as in-depth research on the virus, exploring the symptoms of the disease, psychological problems occurring under quarantine, and combating fake news.

Within the framework of the summit, the winning teams of Zalo AI Challenge shared solutions inspiring them to convincing victories.