Character Chat, Naver Webtoon's artificial intelligence (AI)-based chat service that lets users talk with webtoon characters, has launched a Japanese-language service.
Character Chat is a chat service built by finely analyzing a character's personality, tone, and story information. Naver Webtoon introduced it in 2024 in the "More" menu of its Korean app.
Naver Webtoon said on the 27th that starting on the 24th of this month, it began offering the Character Chat service on its Japanese platform Line Manga under the name "Kyara Chato." The initial chatbots total two: "Terdeo," the male protagonist of the webtoon "My in-laws are obsessed with me," and "Baek Do-hwa," a male character from "Operation: Pure Love."
As of January this year, Character Chat had about 6 million cumulative visitors, with users in their teens and 20s accounting for 78% of the total. The cumulative number of messages exchanged between chatbots and users has surpassed 230 million.
Naver Webtoon emphasized Character Chat's safety, saying, "To launch safe chatbots, we rigorously administer a 'Bias Test,' a process that evaluates whether the AI model avoids bias, for every chatbot release, and we release chatbots only when they meet a certain pass rate threshold."
Character Chat also appears to positively influence consumption of the original webtoons. According to Naver Webtoon, among users of the "Seol Hyo-rim" chatbot from the webtoon "Star-23 Shop," the number of episodes of the original work they read increased 97% when comparing the week before and after that character chatbot's launch. The number of readers rose 29%, the number of paying users 22%, and revenue 44%.
For users of the "99 Reinforced Wooden Club" and "Love" Character Chat, the number of original episodes read increased 77% over the same period. The number of readers rose 20%, the number of paying users 12%, and revenue 31%.
Kang Su-yeon, Naver Webtoon's AI planning lead, said, "As this is Character Chat's first global rollout, we will continue to advance the service to establish the Japanese offering and broaden user experience."