Naver Launches Clova Note in Japan... Full-Scale Global Expansion Begins

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Naver's voice recording artificial intelligence (AI) ‘Clova Note’ is officially expanding globally, starting with its launch in Japan.

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Naver announced on the 24th that it has released the Japanese version of Clova Note. The basic functions are almost identical to the Korean version. When users record Japanese speech directly in the app or upload files, the speech is converted into text, and features such as bookmarking, note-taking, and search are included.

As with the Korean version, speaker differentiation is also possible. However, some features such as sharing, video conference integration, and simultaneous multilingual recognition will be updated later. Korean and English recognition are expected to be provided within the first half of the year.

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Naver applied HyperClova technology to Clova’s proprietary Japanese speech recognition ‘NEST’ engine in the Japanese version of Clova Note to improve accuracy. A self-supervised learning method, which allows AI to utilize unlabeled data for training, was applied to efficiently enhance performance.

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Meanwhile, Clova Note recently surpassed 2.3 million cumulative downloads domestically, maintaining rapid service growth amid positive user response. Due to an increase in student users at the beginning of the semester, the monthly active users (MAU) nearly doubled to 470,000 last month compared to January.

Naver continues to advance the service based on AI technology. Recently, Chinese was added to the recognized languages, enabling voice recognition for Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. In February, a multilingual recognition feature capable of recognizing mixed Korean and English speech was introduced.

Additionally, convenience features have been enhanced, such as AI extracting ‘key keywords’ to quickly review and navigate the main contents of voice notes, and the ability to highlight important parts. A major content summarization feature using the large-scale AI language model ‘HyperClova’ is also scheduled for release soon. Naver plans to apply Clova Note in the meeting rooms of its newly opened headquarters ‘1784’ for internal meeting minutes management.

Naver plans to expand its global business by sequentially launching Clova Note in North America and Asian markets in the second half of the year, starting with Japan. It will also develop the service into a work environment-specialized tool by strengthening integration with various work tools along with business account and group management functions.

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Han Ik-sang, the responsible leader of Clova Note at Naver, said, “The biggest differentiator of Clova Note is its unparalleled speech recognition performance based on Naver’s voice AI technology,” adding, “We will continue to expand the service regions and strive to provide global users with the convenience of AI voice recording in their daily lives.”