ⓒ POSICUBE

Now it’s time to take a look at a Korean business bringing about changes in the global economy with some new ideas. 

Today, we’re going to introduce you to POSICUBE, a developer of artificial intelligence or AI services. Let’s hear from company CEO Oh Sung-jo (오성조). 

Established in 2017, POSICUBE provides AI services to help people resolve inconveniences in a practical way. The company name means “free and positive problem-solving.” It released a beta service in 2018 with a goal of expanding its AI-driven voice service, which is now used by various financial companies and public institutions to resolve problems of customers. 

Mr. Oh previously took charge of Samsung Pay, which is a mobile wallet platform of Samsung Electronics. More than 30 percent of POSICUBE workers, including Oh, came from the wireless business division of the South Korean tech giant. POSICUBE was created by competent engineers who had a vision for AI technology. 

AI may remind many people of AlphaGo and autonomous driving first. But POSICUBE came up with something that is used more commonly in everyday life. People use call centers to get things done quickly but they often hear a voice asking them to wait for a moment. The company decided to introduce AI technology to call centers and developed a solution called “Robi Reception.” The service does not keep customers waiting and responds within seconds. 

To put it simply, Robi Reception is an AI consultant sitting in for human employees at call centers. The virtual consultant makes phone calls or answers the phones to serve customers so human consultants can focus on their work more effectively. If customers call and ask about insurance claims services, for example, the AI consultant understands what the customers said. Based on the sentences it understood, it asks the customers relevant questions, hears their reply and informs them of what they need to know, just like human workers.

 

People often call companies or public agencies to resolve their problems. Robi Reception is a tailored AI service that responds to the customers. It offers quick and precise answers based on data classified by the types of business and institution. A test result shows that it can respond within 0.8 seconds and the answers are more than 99.8 percent accurate. 

Robi Reception not just takes the calls but make phone calls as well, when necessary. Replacing social workers, it may call old people who live alone to ask them if they had meals and make sure they are doing well. It also puts them through to human counselors for more consultation, if necessary. 

The AI consultant also calls people to sell insurance. It is helpful for both insurance salespeople who are sometimes emotionally hurt by rude customers over the phone and receivers who feel sorry for being curt with the human callers. 

Insurance consultants usually make dozens of phone calls a day. But the AI consultant may call customers first to ask them if they are interested in insurance. If they say yes, it puts them through to human consultants. As a result, insurance salespeople can focus on their activities without being offended by people who are indifferent to insurance. 

Our service is also used to deal with inquires about passport issuance or parking problems at public institutions. Boryeong(보령) City Hall, for instance, does not run a call center but only two public servants take more than 150 phone calls all day long. If one of them is absent, the other official just cannot handle all the calls. But the AI consultant receives the calls first and connects them with the officials when necessary. 

POSICUBE’s AI consultant isn’t a simple chatbot. It can speak a natural language and evolves through dialogue with humans to perform most of the roles of the automatic response system and call centers. 

In recognition of its technology, the company’s service has been selected as one of the innovative products designated by the Public Procurement Service. Robi Reception has been introduced to financial companies including insurance firms as well as the Dongrae District Office in Busan, the Guro District Office in Seoul and Seongnam City Hall. 

Based on its image analysis technology, POSICUBE also provides a service called “Robi Scanner.” It can convert images in standard formats such as identification cards and credit cards into text and recognize human faces through cameras. The service is used for non-face-to-face customer authentication and credit card recognition for simple payment. 

These days, people do not go to brick-and-mortar banks to open a bank account. Rather, they use apps. In that case, information about their ID cards or credit cards should be recognized, but it’s a complicated process. But mobile phone cameras with an optical character recognition or OCR application can recognize the cards in less than a second with an accuracy of more than 97 percent. That’s where our technology comes in. Our service can also prevent credit card theft and fraud. Indeed, OCR technology plays a major role in offering contactless services. Our service is used by mobile payment platforms such as Kakao Pay and Toss as well as large financial firms including Hana Bank, Hana Card and KB Kookmin Card. 

Much of the credit of POSICUBE’s innovative services should go to its R&D staff, who account for 80 percent of the company’s entire workforce. Thanks to its technological prowess and the wide use of its services, the company has seen sales grow 200 percent each year. 

As contact-free culture is spreading in the pandemic era, more and more people and companies are looking for the company’s services, which are also used for self-diagnosis of COVID-19. Despite its success, the company tries hard not to forget its original intention. 

We’ll continue to expand services that would prove helpful for society and raise social values, including public services designed to take care of older people living alone. We hope to reinforce our service features to help out the so-called “emotional workers” at call centers so AI-powered services can be used to ease the workload of vulnerable groups. We pursue AI technology that mingles well with people. As a startup, we have a goal of producing profit. But at the same time, we also seek to develop technology and services that promote positive social values.

We can feel warmth, not coldness, in POSICUBE’s cutting-edge technology. The company is developing AI technology that would not take human jobs but help people live more decently. We’re looking forward to more positive changes the company will bring about.