Zalo AI (Kiki)
Vietnam's home-grown voice assistant for cars and the Zalo app
Overview
Kiki is VNG's Vietnamese-language voice assistant from Zalo AI, running in the Kiki Auto in-car app on 25 brands' car screens and as Kiki Info inside Zalo, backed by the in-house KiLM model. Kiki Basic is free; Kiki Premium costs 490,000 VND (about US$19) a year.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 1 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Voice music playback
- Navigation
- Questions and answers
- In-car device controls
- Traffic alerts
- Automatic traffic-fine reports
- Saved addresses
- "Kiki ơi" wake word
What you can produce with Zalo AI (Kiki)
- Vietnamese voice assistant tuned for regional accents
- Kiki Auto in-car voice control
- Kiki Info Q&A assistant inside Zalo
- KiLM in-house Vietnamese language model
- Zalo AI developer APIs for speech and content filtering
ASEAN Perspective
Zalo AI (Kiki) in Southeast Asia
Kiki is built for how people actually use a phone in Vietnam rather than for how a product demo goes: it lives inside Zalo, the messaging app most of the country already has open, and Kiki Auto answers Vietnamese voice commands while driving. VNG built the KiLM model underneath from scratch rather than wrapping a foreign API, which is what makes the Vietnamese speech handling work. For developers, the limitation is simple: there is no public API. Kiki is a consumer product to be studied as a national-champion case, not a platform to build on.
Kiki is Vietnam's most widely used home-grown voice assistant: tuned for Vietnamese and regional accents, built into car screens from 25 accessory brands, and backed by VNG's own KiLM model with data kept in Vietnam. Its benchmark standing comes from a test Zalo itself created, and it ranks behind larger open models there. Kiki Basic is free, and Premium adds useful driving extras for about US$19 a year. A strong choice for Vietnamese drivers; of little relevance outside Vietnam.
What we found
Kiki is the Vietnamese-language voice assistant from Zalo, the messaging app run by VNG Corporation. Unveiled in December 2020 at the Zalo AI Summit, where it was demonstrated in a Maserati, it now lives mainly in Kiki Auto, an in-car app that handles voice commands for music, navigation, questions and in-car controls and is built into the smart screens of 25 car-accessory brands. Zalo says Kiki Auto passed 1.5 million installs by April 2026 and is in more than 20% of cars in Vietnam, and it won best voice assistant at the VnExpress Tech Awards 2024. Kiki Info, a question-answering assistant reachable as an official account inside Zalo, drew over a million visits in its first two months by Zalo's count and has since absorbed a citizen-services assistant. Kiki is trained on regional accents, and VNG stores user data inside Vietnam.
Behind Zalo's AI features sits KiLM, its in-house large language model, trained on eight Nvidia DGX H100 servers. On VMLU, a Vietnamese benchmark that Zalo AI itself created with Japan's JAIST, KiLM-13B ranks fourth among models trained from scratch, behind QwQ-32B, Qwen2.5-72B and Llama-3-70B and just ahead of GPT-4, though the leaderboard warns that private models' results cannot be verified. Zalo has 81.3 million monthly users, and VNG says about 24 million use its AI messaging and calling features each month. Zalo is a founding member of the Au Lac AI Alliance, a group of more than 20 Vietnamese companies and universities working on AI research, standards and training, and its developer portal offers APIs for speech, text-to-speech and content filtering, though not for KiLM or Kiki.
Kiki Auto has been freemium since August 2025. Kiki Basic is free, and Kiki Premium costs 490,000 dong a year, about US$19 including tax, adding traffic alerts, automatic traffic-fine reports, saved addresses and the "Kiki ơi" wake word.
For Vietnamese drivers and Zalo users it is the most established home-grown voice assistant.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Zalo AI (Kiki)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Zalo AI (Kiki) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Zalo AI (Kiki) directly →
Spotted something out of date? Suggest an update →
Alternatives to Zalo AI (Kiki)
More in LLMs & Chat
