Line, in line to launch digital assistant Clova

Without any exaggeration ‘Line’ may be referred as Facebook of Japan. Here you find everyone on the same social network, sending direct messages to one another, sharing photos and making free calls.

The app ‘Line’ is available in United States and other countries also but the major concentration of its users is in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia.

In an estimated data more than two-third of its audience is said to be based in this region only.

At 214 million monthly active users, Line is dwarfed in size by the Facebook social network and the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp chat applications, which each have over 1 billion users.

It plans to build up market share in Asian countries — say in Korea and Vietnam, where it is behind local powerhouses — and then one day return to the United States.

Now Line is planning to go further than its larger rivals by introducing a personal digital assistant-Clova, Line’s very own version of Siri, Cortana and Alexa by offering an update for the Asian version of the app.

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In 2015, Line gave a try to expand in U.S. but it didn’t find much success though they had celebrity endorsers like Taylor Swift and Paul MaCartney.

Facebook and Apple’s iMessage have also picked up few of the popularized features of Asian messaging apps notably Line and WeChat, such as stickers etc.

“We think we are ahead of the curve, and what is happening here will soon be happening in other regions,” Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa commented.

He further added, “Via the personal assistant everything will converge and Clova will be in the middle, closing the distance between the user and everything else.”

Clova is first planned to be launched in Japan and Korea and subsequently to be rolled out in other countries.