South Korean researchers develop Socratic AI and typing-based personalization

Researchers in South Korea have developed new artificial intelligence technologies focused on deep inquiry and real-time user personalization.

Professor Park Tae-jung of Seoul Cyber University has created ‘AskTalk’ (Mun-dap Talk-tok), a Socratic AI platform. Unlike standard generative AI that provides direct answers, this platform uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to engage users in follow-up questioning. It is designed to help users examine their own arguments, premises, and logic, making it applicable for debate education, professional consulting, and organizational diagnosis.

Separately, a research team led by Professor Kong Tae-sik at UNIST has developed ‘ExPerT’, a technology that personalizes AI responses by analyzing both the content of a question and the user's typing behavior. By measuring rhythms such as key press duration and backspace frequency, the system can estimate a user's expertise level in real-time. This method reduced expertise estimation errors by 18.4% compared to analyzing text alone, allowing the AI to adjust its response complexity to match the user's specific knowledge level.