The Story of the Father of the Vietnamese Percussion UniK and the Making of AI for USD 2 Billion

In a recent sharing session about Momo’s vision of a super application related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, a special character appeared. He is Pham Kim Long, father of UniK, the most popular Vietnamese percussionist in Vietnam, which has millions of Windows computer users.

Graduating from Hanoi University of Science and Technology in 1996, Mr. Long spent the next 10 years studying, researching and working in the Czech Republic. In 1999, the first official version of Unikey was born. After more than 20 years, Unikey is present on most Vietnamese computers running Windows.

Since 2006, Mr. Long has allowed Apple to use Unikey’s source code in Apple products. Currently, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook devices all use the Unikey core for Vietnamese percussion available on the machine.

Since returning home in 2008, Mr Long worked at IBM Vietnam, FPT Telecom and VNG respectively, before moving to a unicorn company that was the first billion USD technology unicorn in Vietnam. The other is Momo from mid-2021.

At VNG, Mr Long used to be in charge of several important products, such as Laban Key, a Vietnamese percussion that is popular with smartphone users in Vietnam, and then worked as director of Zalo AI, an entity that specializes in application virtualisation. Develops auxiliary products. WHO.

“After 8 years of working with VNG in particular and Zalo in general, I also want to take on new challenges. Fintech (Technology) finance – PV) is a completely new field for me, so I find it very appealing. Zalo also invests a lot in AI, but projects are flying high, but in Momo, it’s tied to daily life”, shared Mr. Long with Mr. Dan Trai Regarding your redirection decision.

At the new company, Mr. Long currently holds the position of AI Research and Development Director, in charge of research groups on natural language processing technology and computer vision.

Mr Long said he is solving natural language processing problems with AI, building customer care chatbots implementing deep learning technology. Not only building chatbots for super applications, the company also aims to build a chatbot platform so that partners can build their own chatbots in the shortest possible time. In addition, he is also working to help the company develop its own technology to identify and identify customers (eKYC) through faces, images, documents and personal information.

Currently, Mr. Long is one of 7 members of Momo’s AI Council, along with several other senior leaders of this super application, which is currently valued at $2 billion.