Hyundai Card, the credit card issuer affiliated with Hyundai Motor Group, has launched an artificial intelligence-based chatbot service to respond to customer inquiries, as part of its vision to evolve beyond finance into a digital company, according to officials.

Buddy, the virtual agent available through Hyundai Card’s mobile application or website, offers users a real-time conversation with two personas -- Fiona and Henry. The service kicked off earlier this month as a beta version and is slated to later expand into a full version after gathering sufficient conversing data.

Customers can not only make inquiries about specific credit cards or financial services, but also seek out detailed solutions such as the comparison of membership benefits or partnership services.

What marks Buddy from other chatbot services in the industry is its broad understanding of the Korean language, backed by IBM Watson’s language processing technology, officials explained.

While most AI-based conversation systems tend to recognize only the keyword, on which they may conjecture the intention of the entire context, Buddy is capable of analyzing a wide variety of grammatical irregularities.

The various customer inquiry samples collected from Hyundai Card’s call center records also promoted the linguistic adaptability of the system, according to the company.

“This is a pre-emptive response to the rapidly changing business environment, providing a differentiated customer experience. This will help us take a leap to becoming a true digital company,” a Hyundai Card official said.

The company’s plan is to train the program to respond to personalized inquiries or to offer lifestyle-oriented information by integrating customer data such as credit card usage.