Vietnam's technology firms have gathered strength on AI research

In late 2017 and 2018, Zalo organized Zalo AI Summits, gathering many experts in AI from Vietnam and other countries. In the last event, Zalo reviewed its achievements after one year of implementing the AI development strategy. It established Zalo AI division and two key projects – Zalo Brain and Zalo Assistant -- for R&D purposes.

One of the two products, the Ki Ki chat it, has been completed and was introduced at 2018 summit. 

The difference between Ki-Ki and the AI apps developed by large technology firms is in the capability of identifying accents of Vietnamese people from the northern, central and southern regions.

Chabots are developed by the world’s biggest technology firms such as Apple, Google and Amazon.  

The products not only appear on smartphones. Developers have been integrating chatbots on other devices as well, such as smart loudspeakers, TVs and smart screens.

In Vietnam, as foreign ecosystems from Google and Amazon have not touched the lives of the majority of people, Zalo is planning to integrate Ki-Ki into hardware devices. It stated that it would introduce smart loudspeakers in the near future.

Viettel, established as a telco, has also jumped on the bandwagon. Viettel Cyberspace Center has been established and AI is one of the focuses for R&D. VTCC.AI is developing voice identification technology.

Vietnamese AI apps have also become better known in the international market. Elsa, an app that helps practice English spelling developed by Van Dinh Hong Vu, has been named as one of thr top five AI apps globally.

Vu said self-protection plays an important role for a startup to survive. AI is is not easy to copy, so the businesses with AI core have great advantages over their rivals.

Apart from integrating AI directly into products, technology firms now are developing AI solutions according to the orders of enterprises. An analyst commented that processing AI apps for foreign partners is a growing trend, just like software outsourcing Vietnam has been doing for many years.

“FPT AI and AI Academy are two of the firms which specialize in this work. They don’t have products of their own, but their engineers can understand the requirements of clients and can apply existing AI models,” said Nguyen Phong, an AI researcher of Hitachi.

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