If the news of the last few days is any indication, a sufficiently advanced chatbot will soon be worth its digital weight in gold in the world of automated customer service. For Line, that’s all the more reason to get in the game.
Financial Times reported that Tokyo-based and South Korean-owned Line is preparing an artificial intelligence chatbot service to rival the likes recently announced by Facebook and WeChat. Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa acknowledged the fact that while his company might be in a less advantageous position to expand its AI chat offering than the larger competitors who’ve grabbed headlines in the past week, it’s no less important for Line to try to keep up with what seems like the next wave of AI commercial communications.
“If you look across the world, everyone is taking a similar approach,” Idezawa told FT. “In terms of company size and human resources, we’re no doubt in the challenger’s position.”
While Line might not see much competition from Facebook across its user base primarily drawn from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, it will certainly have to fight a war of attrition with WeChat and its 650 million monthly users. Line, on the other hand, can boast just 215 million active monthly users, and it’s this limited regional reach — despite what feats its burgeoning chatbots can achieve — that has analysts, like Neha Dharia from Ovum, skeptical about the odds of success of the new initiative.
“Line has been good at creating services that are attached to the messaging app, but all of these services are local and cultural in their usage,” Dharia told FT. “But it hasn’t been able to translate its success globally.”
Perhaps chatbots can do that for Line, and perhaps they can’t. But it’ll be an uphill climb, whether it’s on automated wheels or under the power of the company’s own two feet.
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