Upstage Launches AskUp on KakaoTalk

Upstage has launched AskUp, a conversational service combining OCR technology and ChatGPT, on KakaoTalk. It gathered 30,000 channel friends in just 3 days through word of mouth alone, and works by reading and understanding uploaded photos of documents to provide answers.

Users can start using it right away by searching for the AskUp channel on KakaoTalk or visiting https://askup.upstage.ai to add it. Upstage's OCR accurately recognizes characters across various fonts and backgrounds, and can process both text documents and handwritten images.

Key use cases include the following.

• Extracting needed information from documents such as study materials, business registration certificates, and contracts
• Sending an image together with a message to combine OCR results with context for better answers
• Depending on the question, even responding with weather at the current location, clothing suggestions, or activity recommendations

AskUp, applied to KakaoTalk and LINE, is described as going beyond a simple chatbot, improving answer quality through prompt tuning and context combination. Going forward, plans include adding a recommendation Pack, search+recommendation (Seargest), and long-term memory features that can retrieve needed content from past conversations.

To celebrate the launch, an event will run until Thursday, March 16, offering 100 free Q&As to users who add the AskUp channel on KakaoTalk. Normally limited to 100 per month, during the event period users can have up to 100 conversations per day.

Alongside AskUp, Upstage is also promoting Upstage AI Pack, which bundles multiple AI technologies including OCR, recommendation, and search, emphasizing it as a no-code/low-code solution that lets companies handle everything from data processing to modeling and metric management in one place.