AskUp Launches on LINE

Upstage is officially launching its popular domestic Chat AI, AskUp, on the global messenger LINE, moving to expand overseas. The company plans to target markets with high LINE market share, starting with Japan and followed by Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

AskUp is a chatbot that combines GPT-4 with Upstage's OCR technology, offering not only natural language conversation but also real-time search, image generation, and food recognition features. On LINE, users can access the same functionality as on KakaoTalk simply by adding it as a friend, without separate authentication, and are given 100 GPT-3.5 messages and 10 GPT-4 messages for free.

In particular, Upstage's OCR is highlighted as technology that won 4 titles at the ICDAR Robust Reading Competition. It can process documents, handwritten images, study materials, business registration certificates, contracts, and more, and the company notes it is competitive for global users thanks to high recognition rates for Japanese and English.

The search feature also addresses the limitation of ChatGPT, which was only trained on information up to 2021, and reduces hallucination by providing source links alongside its answers. With the addition of the image generation model Upsketch and the food analysis feature FoodLens, users can handle everything from document translation and summarization to image generation and diet analysis within the messenger.

Upstage plans to accelerate its global expansion by leveraging LINE's scale of 95 million MAU in Japan and 198 million MAU worldwide. At the same time, it also operates AskUp Biz, a service for enterprises, providing business tools such as AskUp Doc, AskUp Web, and AskUp Slack.