01

A Rising Star in Next-Generation SW Industry
from Hancom Inc.

Hancom Inc., one of Korea's first generation SW companies, established in 1990, is now enjoying its second peak, 26 years after the establishment, as its sales exceed 10 billion KRW. A full PC-mobile-cloud office lineup was established as Hancom Office NEO was released last January. Only Microsoft and Hancom are companies having such technological power.
Hancom is making full-scale efforts for variation and globalization of the business, and Hancom Interfree is at the center of the efforts. Hancom Interfree is a joint corporation established by Hancom and Systran International, the world's top company in mechanical translation solutions. Hancom Interfree was initiated as an in-house venture in Hancom Inc. in 2015. GenieTalk, the interpretation and translation service application jointly developed by Hancom Interfree and ETRI, was selected as the official automatic interpretation and translation software for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. GenieTalk is highly evaluated for making a significant contribution to an 'Olympics Free of Language Barriers.'

02

GenieTalk, a Combination of Mechanical Translation and
Artificial Neural Network

The automatic interpretation and translation market is one of the areas where artificial intelligence(AI) technology is have a great impact. Not only global companies, such as Google and Apple, but also Naver and Hancom, providing mechanical translation service to South Korea, have successfully applied Neural Machine Translation(NMT) technology to their own mechanical translation services. Hancom Interfree's GenieTalk was developed by establishing from the early development stage a hybrid interpretation and translation platform by combining Rule-Based Machine Translation(RBMT) technology with the NMT technology, which was also applied to Google Translation and Naver Papago.
For example, the Korean phrase, "배고파 죽겠어," literally meaning "I am so hungry I will die," was translated by Google into “Hungry die,” but GenieTalk rightly translated the phrase to "I’m starving.”
NMT developed by applying AI is a new alternative translation technology that follows RBMT and Statistical Machine Translation(SMT). GenieTalk, Hancom Interfree's hybrid interpretation and translation app, is highly accurate, because it employs both RBMT and NMT simultaneously, evaluates the translation results from the two technologies, and provides a result of higher quality to the users. For example, when an English news article from CNN is translated by GenieTalk, the readers may understand 80% or more of the translated content.

03

Robot Interpreter Breaks Down Language Barriers

Hancom Interfree is focusing on providing differentiated services in combination with specialized domains. The GenieTalk service provided by Hancom Interfree was officially launched as "Hancom MalangMalang GenieTalk" in July last year, following a beta testing period with R&D support from ETRI in the AI field from 2012. MalangMalang GenieTalk provides translation services for a total of 29 languages with the original technologies for eight languages, which are Korea, English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, and German. During the PyeongChang Olympics, the service was provided for nine languages including Arabic.
With cooperation with the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Hancom Interfree of MalangMalang GenieTalk was appointed as the official automatic interpretation and translation service supporter for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, as the world class technological power was recognized by the IOC. It was an honor to Hancom Interfree to provide the mouths and ears for smooth communication among the athletes, spectators, media, and VIPs who came from all over the world. Interpretation and translation services specialized to the Olympic Games could be provided through a demonstration in exhibition games, before the official games, by improving the performance and stabilizing the service. In addition, through cooperation with robot development companies, robot interpreters with GenieTalk were located to support smooth interpretation and translation between international visitors during the festival of peace and unity.
The interpretation and translation technologies have been developed to an unprecedented level through the combination with AI. Hancom Interfree provides customized and specialized services according to the locations and purposes of using the interpretation and translation services. Hancom Interfree is gradually realizing the company's vision to provide online and offline multi-services for communication anytime and anywhere and to develop real-time simultaneous interpretation for removing barriers between a person and another and between humans and technology.