KT rolls out Amazon Alexa support on AI speakers

South Korean telecom giant KT Corp. on Thursday said it rolled out a new service that allows customers to enjoy Amazon’s voice assistant on its artificial intelligence speakers to better meet demand for English education.

KT said it has joined hands with U.S. retail giant Amazon.com Inc. to launch the Dual Brain AI service, which integrates Amazon’s Alexa virtual voice service into its GiGA Genie speakers to support both Korean and English languages.

The service is available immediately on all 3.1 million GiGa Genie 3 devices in the country, offering users access to global content, such as CNN and TedTalks, as well as digital audio books from Audible Inc.

A new display card feature has been installed on KT’s AI speakers to allow customers to see information on a television screen connected to the speaker, giving the telecom operator a competitive edge in the AI speaker market.

“Our point of differentiation is that we provide English text and images up on the screen to provide easy access to education, entertainment and information not just vocally but also visually,” Lee Hong-chul, vice president of the AI/BigData Planning Department, said during an online press briefing.

KT said it plans to install the Alexa service on its GiGa Genie 1 and 2 devices before July this year. Yonhap