Kakao Corp. opened preregistration for Kanana Space, an in-app assistant that will let KakaoTalk users summon AI help with a two-finger swipe, the company said after detailing its agent strategy at if(kakao)26 in Yongin.
Chief Executive Chung Shin-a told developers Tuesday that Kakao wants to shift from menu-driven taps to natural-language requests for everyday tasks—messages, calendar checks, web searches, and settings changes—without leaving the chat app that dominates mobile communication in South Korea.
What Kanana Space promises
Kanana Space appears as the Ryan mascot overlay, accepting voice or text commands. Kakao demonstrated sending messages, adjusting notification settings, and retrieving schedules. Commerce flows—gifts, reservations, and in-chat payments—are on the roadmap, but the company said outbound transfers and messages will still require explicit user confirmation.
A closed beta is scheduled to start in December for preregistered users. That timeline gives Kakao six weeks to harden safety checks after rival messengers faced scrutiny for autonomous agents misfiring on payment APIs.
Models and privacy design
Kakao paired the service pitch with Project Mosaic, a personalization layer that stores user context only for services that receive consent. DigitalToday reported that memory fragments will not roam across agents by default, addressing a concern regulators raised after generative-AI pilots leaked shopping histories in other apps.
Technically, Kakao is splitting work between on-device models for quick requests and cloud models for tasks needing fresh data or external APIs. The company also previewed Kanana-o, a multimodal variant that accepts voice, text, and images, plus Kanvas—a desktop studio for building multi-agent teams that may surface inside KakaoTalk in the first half of 2027.
Competitive stakes
Naver Corp. is pushing AI glasses navigation with Map integrations, while overseas platforms embed assistants in operating systems. Kakao's bet is that Korean users will trust an agent that lives where they already coordinate family chats and small-business orders.
Investors will watch December's beta crash rates and latency more than keynote demos. If Kanana Space can clear Kakao's internal safety bar without throttling response times, it becomes the funnel for monetized shopping and fintech features heading into 2027.
Developers at if(kakao)26 also saw demos of Kanana Live, a duplex voice mode that can interrupt and clarify without ending a session, and Kanana-o encoder modules Kakao plans to open-source. Open releases are part of a credibility play: enterprise buyers want to inspect weights and safety filters before plugging assistants into HR or accounting systems.
Kakao's KakaoBank and Kakao Pay units were not named in the first beta scope, but executives hinted that payment approvals will be the highest-risk integration and therefore last in the rollout. That sequencing mirrors how Apple and Google staged assistant features years ago.
Antitrust watchers in Seoul note that embedding AI inside KakaoTalk could reinforce the app's dominance in messaging, making it harder for smaller startups to compete unless Kakao exposes APIs on fair terms. Regulators have not opened a case, but the Fair Trade Commission's digital-platform guidelines will apply to any default placement of Kanana Space in the chat UI.