【The Ages of Lulu (1990)】

Amazon's Alexa may be The Ages of Lulu (1990)up against big competition.

South Korean internet giant Naver, which runs Line, Japan's biggest messaging app, unveiled on Wednesday its own AI virtual assistant.

The new assistant is called Clova, and will be entirely voice-based. It'll be available as a smartphone app as well as a hardware speaker called Wave, similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Clova is scheduled to be available in Japan and South Korea between April and June this year.

Naver is also tying up with huge conglomerates Sony in Japan and LG Electronics in South Korea, to get the Clova into toys and home appliances down the road.

Clova will be able to respond to users' questions, as well as provide information on various topics, from the weather to the news.

The offering will address a high-tech market in Asia that until now has been sorely underserved.

"We are aiming to make Clova Asia's leading cloud AI platform," Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa said during the Mobile World Congress show.

Line has 217 million monthly users, with a large majority of them based in Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.

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