Krafton Launches Open-Source AI Brand Raon

SEOUL, South Korea — Krafton Inc. on Thursday launched its artificial intelligence brand, Raon, and released four open-source AI models on the Hugging Face platform.

The release includes a voice-supported large language model (LLM), a real-time voice conversation model, a text-to-speech (TTS) model, and a vision encoder.

The deployment demonstrates the company’s internal capabilities throughout the foundation model development cycle, from data collection to performance evaluation.

The 9-billion-parameter Raon-Speech model ranked first among open-source voice models with fewer than 10 billion parameters in both English and Korean across 40 benchmarks, according to the company.

The full-duplex Raon-SpeechChat model processes real-time bidirectional communication, including interruption handling, backchanneling, and response latency. According to Krafton, it is the first real-time bidirectional voice model released in South Korea.

The Raon-OpenTTS model was trained on open-source voice data that Krafton has also released for external developers.

According to the company, the model demonstrated top-tier naturalness in blind tests against TTS models trained on proprietary data.

The fourth model, Raon-VisionEncoder, processes visual data for AI comprehension.

Internal testing showed that Raon-VisionEncoder exceeded Google's SigLIP2 on some visual recognition tasks and achieved more than 90 percent of its performance across other metrics.

The technology is expected to be incorporated into Krafton's upcoming project to develop a proprietary AI foundation model.

Chief AI Officer Lee Kang-wook said the open-source release is intended to provide researchers with access to large-scale training data and core models to support the development of multimodal technology.

Thursday’s launch follows recent Krafton AI initiatives, including the KIRA personal assistant introduced last year and the open-source Terminus-KIRA technology released last month, as the company incorporates Co-Playable Character (CPC) technology into its video game portfolio.