Kim Yoon, head of the newly created AI Research Center at SK Telecom, vowed to develop human-centered artificial intelligence technologies and create new insights and knowledge that cannot be produced by humans at a press conference Wednesday.

“A key approach to develop such human-centered AI will be creating a human-focused user interface so that people can use the AI platform intuitively with no need for additional explanations,” Kim said.

Kim was a former developer of Apple’s voice assistant Siri and headed the speech recognition part of Apple’s AI speaker Home Pod. 

Kim’s direction for the No. 1 telecom company’s AI business is to create a user interface that can be operated by what people see, read, speak, listen, write and feel, he explained.

“The design of an AI speaker’s user interface should be extremely simple and keep away from having too many images,” he said.

He took office as the executive vice president and head of SKT’s AI Research Center six weeks ago.

In addition to the existing AI business division that is in charge of commercializing AI platforms and services, the South Korean mobile carrier set up the new research center in order to conduct research and develop leading technologies.

The center has hired about 30 AI experts, and plans to double the size of the organization by the end of the year by recruiting talented software experts abroad, he said.

“The ultimate goal is to allow the AI speaker to learn by itself not just based on data input by human users but on data and insights that are newly created through deep learning,” Kim said. “And AI technologies should be able to produce knowledge that can’t be produced by humans. Our goal is to develop such AI technologies.”

Kim decided to join SKT because of the mobile carrier’s cutting-edge big data technologies and SK Group’s philosophy to seek social values such as people’s happiness, he said.

“The quality of data will be very important to develop a good AI platform, and I believe one of the crucial assets of SKT is its user data that it has earned based on the consent of its consumers,” he said. “How to manage and converge the pieces of data will be the most important in developing AI services, and SKT will try to add special value to the data.”

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)