Something that I found eye-opening at our company visit this morning, NAVER, was just how big of an impact a company’s target market can have on their success relative other companies that offer similar services. NAVER is essentially the Google of Korea. It turns out that “of Korea” component is a huge part of what makes them so successful because they took a service that is aimed at a broader audience and made it really, really good for one group of people.

 The company offers a search engine, a video streaming service called VLIVE, a messaging app for Japan called LINE, an AI based translator called Papago, and they are researching and developing numerous other technologies and services which fall under the umbrella of Clova AI. The core areas of Clova are Computer vision, Speech, Recommendation, Machine Learning Platform, and Natural Language Processing.

Within these areas, NAVER is creating some truly impressive products including speech enhancement technology that isolate voices from background noise, audio-visual speech enhancement that can isolate what one speaker is saying when multiple people are talking over each other. They also have a speech synthesis technology for which they only need an impressive 40 minutes of recording to recreate someone’s voice, and they are hoping to drop that time even further to only 15 minutes. They also have an optical character recognition tool that can recognize text in Korean, Japanese, and English, and a Smart Lens feature which allows the user to search NAVER using an image. Finally, Clova AI has developed a video AI AutoCam which can track an individual within a group.

While visiting NAVER, something that was emphasized, especially on our tour, was how intentionally NAVER went about designing its office and the services it offered to its employees. Located in the Green Factory, NAVER is an eco-friendly company, and the design of their office reflects the outdoors with massive amounts of glass and natural light. They have a library with a downstairs filled with design books made to feel like a maze so that people working there feel like they are surrounded by resources and good ideas. The upstairs, with all of the technical books, is designed to feel more like an attic. They also have sensor-based panels which rotate to keep the amount of light entering the building constant without using blinds that block the view of the outdoors and these save up to 7% of the energy in the building. 0fff