LG Uplus is joining forces with three leading Korean universities to develop artificial intelligence (AI) that can understand not only what people say but also their tone, emotions and conversational context, in a push to make interactions between humans and machines more natural. The telecommunications company said Monday it had launched the K-Voice AI Alliance with Seoul National University (SNU), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Yonsei University. The partnership aims to combine LG Uplus' experience in voice AI services with the universities' research capabilities to develop technology specifically tailored to Korean speakers. The project will focus on voice-to-voice (V2V) technology, which allows AI to understand spoken language directly and respond with speech, without first converting conversations into text. Traditional voice AI systems process speech recognition, response generation and voice output in separate stages, a process that can cause delays and produce unnatural-sounding responses. The alliance plans to establish performance evaluation s