Zalo's approach to AI, making it accessible to the general public, is a highlight of Vietnam's artificial intelligence.

Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine a day when a breakfast vendor by West Lake could translate text messages from foreign customers to see what they wanted to buy, or a ride-hailing driver could convert speech into text messages directly on Zalo without typing.

No one names these impressive technological features as they gradually infiltrate daily life. These are all AI products and features that the company is striving to popularize among the Vietnamese people.

2025 marks the explosive growth of the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) product ecosystem. As a pioneer and leader in the AI field, each Zalo product not only demonstrates strong technological capabilities by embracing the latest global trends but also successfully reaches a community of nearly 80 million users.

From work and daily life to entertainment interactions, everything is being "democratized" with the support of Artificial Intelligence, making it accessible and usable by people of all ages and regions.

The company is making efforts to popularize AI products and features among the Vietnamese people.

Born from the desire to create a simple and user-friendly platform, the company has maintained its core direction in developing AI features: simplifying them so that everyone can easily use them.

According to statistics, in 2025, approximately 30% of users will utilize AI features on the messaging platform each month. This demonstrates the growing popularity and integration of the Zalo AI product ecosystem into users' lives.

Currently, the product range includes groups serving work and life, and groups promoting interactive entertainment for users. Among these, notable AI features for work and life include Voice-to-Text conversion, Voice-to-Text message composition, Text-to-Speech conversion, and Translation.

Many users have also embraced and widely used other "Made in Vietnam" AI products. Notably, Kiki Auto stands out – the first Vietnamese in-car assistant to reach 1 million installations and users in Vietnam by the end of 2024. Currently, it is estimated that one in five cars on the road in Vietnam is using Kiki Auto.

In 2025, the company will launch two AI products with comprehensive capabilities, supporting people in multiple aspects. Specifically, in early 2025, the Kiki Info comprehensive Q&A platform will first serve users with a range of useful features including Q&A, Content Creation, and Entertainment.

Kiki Info's Q&A feature can provide answers to a wide range of topics, including science , history, technology, and general knowledge. Notably, this feature also allows users to look up information on Vietnamese traffic laws with the most up-to-date data.

With its strong understanding of the Vietnamese language, Kiki Info delivers accurate responses in a user-friendly and approachable style. Just one week after its launch, Kiki Info recorded nearly 500,000 users accessing the account, with almost 63,000 users sending messages and a total of nearly 500,000 questions asked.

In early 2025, the Kiki Info comprehensive Q&A platform will first serve users with a range of useful features including Q&A, Content Creation, and Entertainment.

Last September, Zalo also introduced its Digital Citizen Assistant application, which provides 24/7 support for inquiries about administrative and legal procedures.

With reliable data developed from reputable legal information sources, the Digital Citizen Assistant application helps users equip themselves with legal knowledge and administrative procedures, serving citizens 24/7 in quickly and accurately searching for information.

The Q&A topics are diverse and cover areas such as land, driver's licenses, marriage, birth certificates, inheritance, business operations, and more.

Zalo's efforts to popularize AI cannot be mentioned without acknowledging its commitment to making AI features more engaging, highly interactive, and widely accessible within the community. Over the years, users have had the opportunity to experience unique features that enhance interaction and entertainment, such as AI Greeting Cards, AI Avatar, and zSticker AI.

AI greeting cards help users create meaningful wishes with personalized content and images.

AI greeting cards help users create meaningful wishes with personalized content and images, thereby conveying loving messages to loved ones on important anniversaries.

Meanwhile, the AI Avatar feature gives users the opportunity to experience unique profile pictures with many impressive styles. Or zSticker AI helps design stickers from existing characters, creating many different variations of the original character, including rich emotions, actions, and outfits. This provides an impressive experience in using stickers, making conversations more interesting and intimate.

In addition to providing an enjoyable daily experience, these features also participate in patriotic campaigns, helping the community of nearly 80 million users spread strong national pride during special moments in the country's history.

Notably, the "Proud of Vietnam" campaign, launched on the occasion of the National Day of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (September 2, 1945 - September 2, 2025) on the messaging platform, recorded nearly 8 million AI avatars created by users.

With the advent of AI technology, users have had the opportunity to spread patriotism in their own unique way in the digital space, simply by wearing a shirt with the red flag and yellow star and standing amidst the country's proud landmarks.

Users have the opportunity to spread patriotism in their own unique way right in the digital space.

Also in 2025, the company launched a widely influential campaign on the platform called "Zalo AI - Back to School Days," to celebrate the end-of-year school ceremony held nationwide and to commemorate International Children's Day on June 1st.

It is clear that the effort to popularize AI has reached all Vietnamese people, winning over users not only with advanced technology and simple, smooth, and attractive features for the average user, but also by fostering a sense of community engagement in enhancing AI capabilities.

In addition to the aforementioned high-impact AI products, the company also invests heavily in research, with labs and over 80 highly skilled engineers specializing in Artificial Intelligence.

In 2023, while large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were revolutionizing the technology world, Zalo chose to pursue sovereign AI – a more arduous and challenging journey.

Instead of taking shortcuts in the LLM training process by choosing readily available fine-tuned models from abroad, Zalo decided to train its own model from scratch.

Thanks to its flexible development strategy, Zalo has shortened the time it took to successfully develop its large-scale language model from the projected 18 months to just 6 months.

At the end of 2023, the Vietnamese-language big-name model was officially launched at the Zalo AI Summit, an event that brought together leading technology and AI professionals in Vietnam.

According to the latest data, at the end of 2024, this model surpassed major names like GPT-4 (OpenAI), Gemma-2-9B (Google), and Phi-3-small (Microsoft), ranking only behind Meta's LLaMA-3-70B in Vietnamese language processing capabilities on the VMLU (Vietnamese Multitask Language Understanding Benchmark Suite for Large Language Models) ranking.

Currently, Zalo is also continuously promoting the transfer of technology from the laboratory to real life by popularizing LLM applications among the people, aiming to make AI accessible to everyone.

Sharing his belief in the future of Vietnamese technology, Zalo founder Vuong Quang Khai affirmed: "The beauty of Artificial Intelligence also comes from its positive impact on people's daily lives. We are here to share successes, aspirations, and inspire new ways to develop technology that changes lives."

The founder is also optimistic about the future of AI in Vietnam: "In terms of AI application development, I am quite optimistic and believe that Vietnamese people are not inferior to anyone, not only in developing domestic applications but also exporting them to the world."

Source: https://znews.vn/zalo-binh-dan-hoa-ai-diem-sang-cua-tri-tue-nhan-tao-viet-nam-post1611640.html