SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, and SoftBank today announced plans to establish a joint venture (JV) at the inaugural meeting of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA) at MWC Barcelona 2024. Through the Joint Venture Company, which will be established within this year, the five companies plan to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies (telcos). This announcement follows the launch of the Global Telco AI Alliance in July 2024, as reported by TelecomTalk.
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Tailored AI Solutions
Reportedly, the LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions via digital assistants and chatbots. The goal is to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic, and Japanese, with plans for other languages like Bahasa so that they can be deployed in Southeast Asia.
The joint venture plans to focus on deploying AI applications tailored to the needs of the Global AI Telco Alliance members in their respective markets, enabling them to reach a global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion across 50 countries.
Market Reach Expansion
It's worth noting that Deutsche Telekom boasts about 250 million subscribers across 12 countries, including Germany and the US. The e& Group has 169 million subscribers in 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while the Singtel Group has 770 million subscribers in 21 countries, including Australia, India, and Indonesia.
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The official release said, compared to general LLMs, telco-specific LLMs are attuned to the telecommunications domain and better at understanding user intent. The LLMs are currently being optimized, and the telco's customer service data is used to fine-tune the model for telco-specific questions so that it can understand, summarize, and respond to customer and telco-specific concerns.
