Kakao’s Kanana Space: What KakaoTalk’s New AI Assistant Does and When It Arrives
Kakao, the company behind KakaoTalk, the messaging app most South Koreans use for everything from family chats to payments, unveiled an AI assistant called Kanana Space on October 13, 2026. It was announced at if(kakao)26, the company’s annual developer conference, held at the Kakao AI Campus in Yongin, just south of Seoul. Pre-registration opened the same day and a closed beta test (CBT) is planned for December. No official launch date has been announced. (Yonhap, News1)
Key points
- What it is: an “AI layer” you can call up anywhere inside KakaoTalk, not a separate tab or app.
- How you open it: swipe down with two fingers, and Ryan (the lion character from Kakao’s Kakao Friends lineup, familiar to almost anyone in Korea) answers by voice. A floating button and a text mode are also available, and Kakao says more of its characters will be added later. (Reported by Yonhap.)
- Timing: pre-registration now, closed beta in December, launch date not announced.
- Control: Kakao says the AI only prepares payments and message sends; the user gives final approval.
Why it matters: from menus to conversation
KakaoTalk is far more than a chat app in Korea; it is the front door to gifting, payments, maps, taxis and banking. That makes an assistant built into it a different proposition from a stand-alone chatbot.
CEO Chung Shin-a said in her keynote that Kakao wants to move from GUI, where users hunt for menus and buttons, to LUI (language user interface), where they simply say what they want. She said fewer than 1% of users are currently active AI users, which is why Kakao is rolling out three layers of AI, starting with the familiar Space layer and building up to teams of personalised agents. (Yonhap) The “fewer than 1%” figure is Kakao’s own estimate, reported by one outlet and not independently confirmed.
News1 framed Kakao’s ambition as becoming “the AI closest to the daily lives of 50 million people,” and reported that the company described splitting work across model tiers: frontier, flagship, small language models (SLMs) and on-device models. (News1)
What Kakao demonstrated
These examples come from the on-stage demo, as reported by Yonhap, and may change before launch:
- Suggesting running clothes and pace based on the weather and the user’s workout record
- Marking a friends folder as read and muting notifications by voice
- Summarising deadlines from work messages and sending a voice-dictated reply
- Finding last week’s requests in a family group chat
Safeguards and privacy
CTO Song Jae-ha introduced “Project Mosaic,” a memory-management system, saying that when AI handles memories it should separate facts from interpretation and record where and when each one came from. Kakao said data a user agreed to share with one service will not be handed to other services, and that “Kanana Safeguard” blocks out-of-scope actions in advance, such as following injected outside instructions or swapping in a different product when an item is sold out. These are company statements; there has been no independent verification yet. (Yonhap, News1)
Kanvas, Kanana-o and Kanana Live
- Kanvas: a PC tool for building agents. You describe a role and it connects the tools and skills needed, running in an isolated browser and sandbox. Kakao is aiming at chores such as Korea’s year-end tax settlement and tax filing. A small closed beta could come as early as this year, with KakaoTalk integration planned for the first half of next year. (Reported by Yonhap.)
- Kanana-o: an “omni” model that handles text, images and voice together. Kakao said it plans to release it as open source. (Yonhap, News1) Kakao also claimed its in-house tokenizer processes Korean sentences 1.6 times more efficiently than competing global models; this is a company claim reported by News1 only and not independently confirmed.
- Kanana Live: technology that lets the AI listen and speak at the same time, still in development.
FAQ
Can I use Kanana Space now?
No. It is at the pre-registration stage, with a closed beta planned for December.
Can I use it outside Korea or in English?
Kakao has not said. The reports cover the Korean service only.
Will the AI make payments or send messages on its own?
According to Kakao, the AI only prepares the action; the user checks and approves the final step.
When is the official launch?
It has not been announced.
This article is based on published news reports, was written with the help of AI tools, and is not a hands-on review.
Sources
- Yonhap News Agency, Oct 13, 2026, “카톡에 한국형 AI 에이전트 도입…말로 주문·예약까지(종합)” (KakaoTalk gets a Korean-style AI agent), https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20261013075951017 (checked Oct 13, 2026 / 2026년 10월 13일 확인)
- News1, Oct 13, 2026, “카카오 ‘5000만 일상에 가장 가까운 AI 될 것’…’카나나’ 기술 공개” (Kakao unveils Kanana technology), https://www.news1.kr/it-science/internet-platform/6318119 (checked Oct 13, 2026 / 2026년 10월 13일 확인)
