South Korea’s leading mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. will unveil its new artificial intelligence (AI) robots at the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, Spain, the company said on Wednesday.

Its new flagship AI robot will be powered by voice and image recognition technology, allowing its users to simply initiate a dialogue to make voice requests and control the robot through hand movement, the company said. The robot will also provide information through the movement of the camera head and graphics on the display.

SK Telecom plans to later introduce more customized services based on intelligent image recognition technology, which allows the robot to identify a user’s face.

The company will also showcase its pilot robot for toddlers at the MWC this year. Connected via Wi-Fi, children can make a call to parents by simply saying “Mom, I miss you.”

It will also introduce an English version of its flagship AI speaker ‘NUGU.’ The new service will be linked with SK C&C’s Avril, an AI platform based on IBM’s Watson, and can answer questions asking weather, radio and other information in English. For example, when the user asks, “What is the highest mountain in the world?,” NUGU will answer “Mount Everest.” The English version of NUGU will be launched within this year.

SK Telecom’s release of a series of AI robot is part of SK Group’s efforts to nurture AI as the group-wide next growth engine. In November, the group revealed its ambitious plan to achieve sales of 300 billion won in its AI-cloud business in 2018 and 600 billion won in 2020. It also aimed to achieve 400 billion won revenue from its AI and cognitive robot convergence business. SK Telecom’s NUGU had already exceeded sales of 15,000 units in just two months since its launch in late September.

By Lim Sung-hyun

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