BARCELONA, SPAIN—Line is building its own voice-activated assistant that could help the popular Japanese messaging app compete directly with the likes of Amazon and Google.
Today, during the Mobile World Congress trade show, Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa outlined the company’s plans to move beyond smartphones into screenless technology. Working with Sony and LG, it’s building a speaker that could compete with voice-activated devices such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home.
Clova, Line’s assistant, is being co-developed with Naver Corp., the main internet portal for South Korea, and will be available as a smartphone app and a speaker called Wave sometime in early summer.
So what will Clova be able to do? Like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistsant, it will be able to provide information about the weather and news, play music, and offer language translation.
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