Kakao AI Mate Canana Dramatically Boosts Personalized Features

Kakao's AI mate service 'Canana' app is revolutionizing user experience through a large-scale update, four months after its beta launch. This revamp actively reflected user feedback, focusing on expanding features and improving usability. The new 'Canana' app has reorganized its initial screen with three intuitive bottom tabs (Home, Chat, More), and the chat room design has also been improved to be cleaner. In particular, the 'Home Tab' goes beyond a 1:1 conversation space with the personal AI mate 'Nana' to newly introduce 5 types of 'Special AI Mates' that will satisfy users' diverse interests. The Special AI Mates are as follows: * **Tarot Mate:** Provides an immersive tarot experience based on AI-generated images. * **Saju Mate:** Interprets Saju (Korean traditional fortune-telling) on a wide range of topics, including daily horoscopes, human relationships, career paths, and finances. * **Challenge Mate:** Helps achieve daily goals, provides authentication stamps, and allows users to share progress with friends. * **Study Coaching Mate:** Helps elementary, middle, and high school students with their studies through professional advice from CEO Lee Byung-hoon, a Daechidong study consultant, and offers a free 150-question learning style test. * **Insurance Consultation Mate:** Provides easy guidance on complex insurance product information and terms through cooperation with AI fintech company Habit Factory. In the 'Chat Tab', users can check and communicate in the group chat rooms they are using, and the 'More Tab' provides functions for setting personal profiles and linking external data such as Google Calendar. Another core aspect of this update is the significant strengthening of 'multimodal AI' capabilities. Going beyond the existing level of image understanding, AI now directly generates and provides images that users desire. In group chats, a collaborative feature for drawing images together according to individual preferences has been added, enabling richer interaction. Voice-based conversation functionality is also supported, allowing users to set their desired voice in various languages such as Korean and English for conversations. Personalization features have also been enhanced, storing 'Memories' based on 1:1 conversation history with mates to provide customized answers. The service's speed and quality have been improved, and 'Canana Safeguard', Kakao's self-developed AI guardrail model, has been applied to effectively block harmful content and elevate service safety to the highest level. Kakao plans to evolve the 'Canana' app into a 'Community AI Service' in the future. To this end, the 'Biased Broadcast' group chat room, which was piloted last August, will be reintroduced to coincide with the 2025 KBO Postseason starting on the 5th. In this group chat room, the group mate 'Cana' will cheer for real-time baseball games with professional baseball fans and provide diverse context-appropriate conversations beyond game broadcasts, such as team-specific cheering, scoring situation summaries, and comeback possibility analyses. Kim Jong-han, Kakao Canana's Performance Leader, stated, "We wanted to activate interaction with AI through various AI mates that provide practical convenience and help in users' daily lives," and added, "We will continuously strive for diverse interest-based AI mates to offer core value not only in individual use but also in group and community activities."