Lezhin launches Teaz AI character chat service in Korea

Lezhin Entertainment is launching Teaz, an AI character chat service built around characters from webtoons published through Lezhin Comics and Bomtoon. The service launches in Korea on October 19, initially as a web experience, with a mobile app planned for a later date. ¹

Characters beyond the page

Teaz lets users interact directly with characters from Lezhin and Bomtoon’s original series. Users can take the role of one of those characters or speak with them from a third-person perspective, turning familiar webtoon casts into the starting point for an interactive conversation rather than a fixed panel-by-panel story.

The service is based on officially licensed intellectual property. Its relationship-focused conversations are designed to change according to a user’s choices, with character responses and relationships developing during the interaction. That makes Teaz closer to a branching character experience than a general-purpose chatbot wearing a webtoon-themed skin.

A staged launch

Lezhin plans to add game-like collection features, including hidden illustrations and items created by the original webtoon artists. The company also intends to introduce additional features in stages, including a text-based role-playing game mode. The first release is web-based, while the planned mobile app gives the service a route to a more conventional app format later on. ¹

The launch follows a wider push by webtoon platforms to extend licensed characters into interactive services. Anime News Network also points to Naver WEBTOON’s byUs service, which launched in July, and earlier character-chat experiments in South Korea and Japan. ¹ YNA reported that KidariStudio, Lezhin Entertainment’s parent company, wants to keep expanding its media offering by combining content IP with technology. ²

Teaz’s international plans remain unclear. Lezhin Entertainment has not announced whether the service will expand into English, so its October 19 launch should currently be understood as a Korean release rather than a global rollout.

Our opinion

Teaz is an interesting test of whether licensed webtoon characters can support meaningful interaction without losing the identity that made their original stories work. The licensed-IP foundation and artist-created collection items give it a more coherent proposition than an anonymous character bot, but the quality of the conversations will decide whether the novelty lasts. For now, the Korean web launch is the concrete step; the app, RPG mode and any English expansion remain future plans.