Line AI Assistant Launches in Japan and Thailand With Local Language Focus
LINE Brings AI to 200 Million Users
LINE Corporation has launched an AI assistant integrated into its messaging platform in Japan and Thailand, its two largest markets. The assistant, called LINE AI, is built on the company's Clova AI platform and features language models specifically trained on Japanese and Thai language data. The feature is available to LINE's 96 million monthly active users in Japan and 54 million in Thailand.
LINE CEO Jungho Shin said the assistant addresses "a gap in the AI market — the major AI assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Apple are optimized for English. Japanese and Thai users deserve AI that understands their language at a native level."
Capabilities
LINE AI operates within the messaging interface, accessible through an @ mention in any chat. Key features include message translation between Japanese, Thai, English, Korean, and Chinese; summarization of long group chat histories; smart reply suggestions that adapt to the user's communication style; and integration with LINE's suite of services including LINE Pay, LINE Shopping, and LINE Travel.
For businesses using LINE Official Accounts — the platform's commercial messaging tool used by over 35 million businesses in Japan — LINE AI offers automated customer service that can handle common inquiries, process orders, and schedule appointments.
Language Model Details
The Japanese model is built on a 70-billion parameter architecture trained on curated datasets including web text, business correspondence, and customer service logs (with privacy filtering). LINE claims it outperforms GPT-4 on Japanese language understanding benchmarks including JCommonsenseQA and JGLUE by 8 to 14 percentage points.
The Thai model uses a smaller 30-billion parameter architecture but was trained with extensive Thai-language data from Line's Thai user base. Thai-language AI has historically received less attention from major AI labs, making LINE's investment notable.
Business Model
LINE AI is free for personal users, with a premium tier at 680 yen per month in Japan offering extended context windows and priority response times. Revenue is expected to come primarily from business subscriptions — companies using LINE AI for customer service pay 50,000 to 500,000 yen per month depending on message volume.
LINE parent company Z Holdings (a subsidiary of SoftBank) has invested 80 billion yen in AI development since 2023. The company views the AI assistant as critical to maintaining LINE's relevance against potential competition from ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which could eventually offer similar messaging integration capabilities.
