South Korea’s leading game developer NCSoft said Tuesday it is working to incorporate artificial intelligence technologies into diverse business areas.

The firm’s research and development pivoting on AI began after a relevant team was launched by NC West CEO Yoon Song-yee in 2011.

Currently, a total of five relevant teams along with a 100-strong workforce are operated under company's CEO Kim Taek-jin, categorized under the AI center and Natural Language Processing center. They include the game AI lab, speech lab, vision taskforce, language AI lab and knowledge AI lab. The company’s AI center is headed by Lee Jay-june.

NCSoft has been releasing new tech-advanced services in recent months.

One of them is PAIGE, an AI-based baseball information providing service unveiled as an early access version in April before being fully updated on July 24.

The core technologies behind PAIGE are the language AI and knowledge AI developed by the NLP center, the company said, to analyze, sum up and edit various content on baseball using AI tech in real time.

NCSoft has also been engaging in R&D on game AI that can help in the process of developing new games such as in planning, art and programming.

The work at present is focused on minimizing the manual work of animators, among others, the firm said.

The company emphasized that its focus on diverse R&D sectors will contribute to society by helping the market stay competitive while fulfilling the needs of customers. (khnews@heraldcorp.com)