In early 2016, we saw human intelligence lose to a self-learning algorithm,... in a historic game of Go between Korea's Lee Se-dol and Google's Alpha Go. <br />Three years on, our Oh Soo-young shows us how far AI has advanced in South Korea. <br />This smart mirror doesn't just show your reflection.<br />"Show me the news."<br />Picking up your voice and gestures,.. it displays your favorite media contents, daily schedule and even makeup tutorials as you get ready in the morning.<br />Skelter Labs is one of South Korea's budding start-ups in artificial intelligence,... aiming to change everyday life with revolutionary technology.<br /><br />"Conversational AI has been around for 2 to 3 years, but the experience hasn't been great because nobody had the technology to provide a good user experience. So, instead of going after the market we keep improving our technology so it could be useful for certain work flows."<br />Following the historic board game between Korean player Lee Se-dol and Google's Alpha Go three years ago,... the world's AI market is expected to have more than tripled this year,... and grow to almost 90 billion dollars by 2025. <br />"Alpha Go was one of the first cases where people directly experienced the power of AI through a game. Commercial areas have now branched out to voice assistants, health, and content personalization. AI is also being adopted in new domains like manufacturing , driverless cars, and IoT. This is just the start. "<br />A growing number of Korean scientists like Jang are rising to the challenge,... developing deep learning -- the so-called brain of artificial intelligence -- as well as speech and image recognition for diverse areas of application.<br />"This isn’t just your average AI speaker. It's also a state of the art health device that records sleep patterns and diagnoses possible disorders."<br />But are these efforts enough?<br />Only 15-hundred papers on AI were published in South Korea in 2017,.. compared to thousands in Europe and the U.S. <br />The number of AI start-ups, while growing, stands at 154,... just one-percent of the country's ventures.<br />China has over 4,000 AI firms. <br />A science ministry body said this month that South Korea's AI technology lags almost two years behind America's.<br />"We need to invest more in core technologies and harness quality data to improve machine learning. We need ten times more start-ups to spark creative destruction. ( )Also, Korea leads the world in semiconductors, shipbuilding and consumer electronics. Optimizing AI( ) in those fields could strongly boost our competence."<br />To nurture an ecosystem of innovation,... the government plans to spend one-point-nine billion dollars until 2022,... to bolster AI technology and produce 5-thousand professionals in the field.<br />Oh Soo-young, Arirang News. <br />
