KakaoTalk to revamp with ChatGPT, Instagram-style feed

Kakao Corp. is set to revamp KakaoTalk, its flagship mobile messenger that dominates South Korea's market, into a feed-based social hub and a short-form video platform, powered by artificial intelligence.

While questions remain over how users across age groups will respond, attention is on whether Kakao can regain ground with the update, anchored by its new in-house AI model, after missing the government's shortlist for a national large language model project.

The IT giant is also under pressure as founder Kim Beom-su faces trial on alleged violations of capital market laws, and is seeking to regroup through service overhauls and other restructuring moves.

At its annual If(Kakao)25 developers’ conference running from Tuesday to Thursday at its AI Campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, the IT giant is expected to unveil an overhaul of its flagship KakaoTalk messenger as well as a joint product vision with OpenAI.

One of the major changes known is the integration of the ChatGPT model into KakaoTalk. Kakao CEO Chung Sin-a said in August that KakaoTalk users would be able to "share ChatGPT search results while chatting with friends or encounter ChatGPT on key screens they access dozens of times a day."

The revamp under review would also allow multiple replies to a message — similar to Meta’s Threads — compared to the current system that limits users to a single reply.

The friends list tab in KakaoTalk will be redesigned from a simple alphabetical list of profiles to a feed-style format for sharing daily posts. Instead of appearing in name order, friends could be displayed based on the order of their posts, similar to Instagram.

A new tab in the app is planned to host exclusive Kakao content and original productions from affiliates, backed by a monetization ecosystem designed to ensure creators are fairly rewarded.

Kakao is overhauling to keep users on the app longer. According to Mobile Index, KakaoTalk's monthly average usage time per user dropped to 674 minutes in August from 790 minutes in August 2021, down by nearly two hours over four years.

"KakaoTalk will evolve beyond a messenger into a platform that encompasses content discovery, exploration and relationship-driven social features," Chung said.

Another focus of the event will be the AI agent codeveloped by Kakao and OpenAI, which is slated for release by early November and is expected to be embedded into KakaoTalk.

The CEO said during the quarterly earnings call that the company's goal was to build on the existing ChatGPT experience by adding Kakao's assets and its deep understanding of local users.

Kakao currently operates a range of services, including KakaoTalk Gifts, Orders, Kakao Map and Calendar. With OpenAI running its own AI agent called Operator, the two technologies combined are expected to enable KakaoTalk's agent to carry out various requests, such as booking a restaurant.

Keynote sessions will be livestreamed on the event’s official website, with full recordings to be uploaded after the conference.

As part of broader revamp efforts, Kakao has extended the time limit for deleting messages on its flagship KakaoTalk messenger to 24 minutes from five to improve user convenience. The company is also holding a group-wide recruitment drive to hire “AI-native” experts across technology and services, the company said.