South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc. that is going all out to turn around its money-losing mobile phone business will add a new artificial intelligence (AI)-applied camera to the new series of its flagship smartphone model V30 to lure consumers.

The company said on Tuesday it will unveil its new flagship phone V30 enhanced with a new feature, an AI-backed camera, at this year’s Mobile World Congress kicking off on Feb. 26 in Barcelona, Spain.

The new AI feature, dubbed Vision AI that will be applied to the V30’s camera, can automatically analyze objects and recommend an optimal shooting mode among eight modes - portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, flower, sunrise and sunset - with the best setting for each.

LG Electronics has teamed up with a German image analysis company and developed more than 1,000 algorithms for image analysis after analyzing more than 100 million images, the Korean company said. It also has collaborated with Korea’s leading online portal operator Naver to enable the phone to provide search results or recommend shopping options for an object shot by the phone camera on a single shooting. For example, users can easily initiate an image search and check the shopping options for an item by simply taking a picture of the object.

On top of that, LG Electronics in partnership with Google plans to enhance another AI technology, dubbed Voice AI that allows users to activate apps or change settings with voice, using Google Assistant.

“We’ll add more advanced features to provide convenience to our customers,” said a LG Electronics official.

LG Electronics’ mobile communication division remained in red in the fourth quarter ended December last year, reporting an operating loss of 213.2 billion won ($196.8 million). The launch of its V30 helped to increase overall sales of its mobile communication business somewhat, but failed to reverse the trend after its sales came below expectations.

By Lee Jae-cheol and Lee Ha-yeon

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