BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) company Ubase Group said on Jan. 29 it signed an industry-academic cooperation agreement with Seoul National University's Natural Language Processing Lab and will pursue joint research to advance AI counselling.

Ubase said it decided to collaborate with the Seoul National University lab after judging that a linguistic approach to Korean is needed to realise natural AI counselling.

Ubase said its AI Application Research Institute, newly created in December, will participate in the collaboration. The institute has focused on improving customer experience through AI technology research and development and on supporting contact centres where counsellors can work with AI in a more professional and stable way.

Ubase's AI Application Research Institute and Seoul National University's Natural Language Processing Lab plan over the next six months to take a linguistic approach to AI and secure technology that accurately recognises and processes voice conversations. They will in particular draw up a strategy for AI to flexibly identify the needs and emotions of counselling customers by reflecting Korean language characteristics such as omission and honorifics. They will also build evaluation metrics that can measure this.

Mok Jin-won (목진원), chief executive of Ubase, said, "Call bots that incorporate AI technology are being used partially across various industries, but they are limited to short answers based on fixed scenarios, and there are limits to understanding the context of actual counselling settings." He said, "Ubase is focusing on developing AI agents for counselling with in-house technology, and through industry-academic cooperation we want to identify the context of everyday language and linguistic principles and advance our AI counselling solution to a natural level."