A promotional image provided by Naver Webtoon.
SEOUL, Dec. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Naver Webtoon, an online platform for digital comics run by South Korea’s leading portal operator Naver, said Monday it has developed new technology that can recognize the image-based lines of webtoons and turn them into text to enable visually-handicapped people to enjoy comics
The company announced that it had developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help visually-handicapped people enjoy webtoons, adding that it will launch the Barrier Free webtoon beta service in January.
Unlike general images, webtoons need to deliver stories, and thus face limitations when it comes to existing optical text recognition technology.
However, the newly-developed technology uses the location information of scene cuts and speech balloons and recognizes the lines of webtoons as sequential texts to deliver stories.
Visually-handicapped people can enjoy webtoons while listening to sequential texts by using a smartphone’s voice-over or talk-back functions.
Naver Webtoon plans to apply the webtoon-replacing texts to about 180,000 episodes of the webtoons that are already finished or in service for the launch of the new service next year.
After launching the beta service in Korean, Naver Webtoon plans to expand to other languages on a gradual basis.
Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)
