The Seoul city government is in discussions with tech firms, including Google, Microsoft, and Naver, to provide foreigners with AI-powered chatbot services in multiple languages for tour planning in the city. The state-backed tourism foundation, Seoul Tour Organization, plans to offer these services on its travel guide website Visit Seoul in collaboration with a generative AI service provider. The website currently provides tour information in Korean and six other languages commonly spoken by foreign visitors to Seoul. With the introduction of AI chatbots, the website aims to cater to dozens of languages and provide personalized travel plans based on real-time information about tourist spots. The tourism foundation is in talks with Google, Microsoft, Naver, and AI startups to launch the service, and testing is expected to begin soon, with the official launch targeted for next year. Google views this project as a great opportunity to use its large language model (LLM), which is trained on extensive data, for generating and translating texts. The company believes that Seoul is an ideal testbed for its generative AI, given the city’s technological advancement and cultural openness. Naver, on the other hand, highlights the compliance of its domestic servers with cloud computing service guidelines and the extensive Korean language database it possesses. The company recently debuted its upgraded LLM HyperCLOVA X and is currently providing a beta service of its conversational AI service.