It was inevitable that at least one carrier would announce a major effort at Barcelona’s MWC this year to build smartphones at a top AI company. And here’s it: Deutsche Telekom (DT) said it is building the “AI Phone,” a low-cost mobile phone created in close collaboration with Pickersaty and others, along with Picsart and others.
DT will unveil the device later this year and will begin selling it in 2026 at a price tag of under $1,000. Initially, it was aimed at the European market, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
“We are becoming an AI company,” Claudia Nemat, a member of the DT board of directors who oversees Telecom technology and innovation, said at a press conference Monday. Rather than building a basic, large-scale language model, she quickly added.
In particular, the confusion, a startup from Silicon Valley, currently valued at around $9 billion, is touted as a key role in the development of phones. This is a signal that today’s most well-known startups in today’s generative AI search engines are taking steps to create more “active” products.
“The confusion is simply shifting from an answer machine to an action machine,” said Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, on stage at the event. “We’ll not only answer questions, but we’ll start things for you. We can book flights, book reservations, send emails, send messages, make calls, and place all kinds of things like Set Smart reminders.”
This seems to be the first time embarrassment has signed a contract to develop an AI interface for carriers and smartphones, but with an assistant there is already a bit of experience. It seems likely that this new “AI Phone” template will be in January.
This news is the latest development of familiar stories from the world of communications. For years, both mobile and fixed carriers have been seeking ways to compete better with technology companies.
Specifically, they focus on things like Apple, Google, and more. Apple and Google have created operating systems and phones that separate telecom companies from the formula when they make money around apps and “own” their customer relationships. Over the years, we’ve seen our partnership with Mozilla and created career-first phones to compete with these two. (The Firephone wasn’t too hot after all, as it was called.) And Facebook had many cozy years, as social networks also made their own footing stronger in the mobile world. (Meta is focusing the attention of hardware and communications elsewhere, as is now called.)
Moving fast and breaking things is not part of the telecom wheelhouse. Perplexity and Deutsche Telekom have been working together since holding their partnership in April 2024. DT first spoke about the “AI phone” a year ago at last year’s Mobile World Congress event.
Nemat didn’t get much of the hardware details, such as device specifications, nor did it provide any information about who is building it or which operating system to run (from concept rendering it looks like an Android flavor). We contacted DT directly and the spokesman said these details will be disclosed later in the year.
Nemat noted that AI is burned into the phone and the experience is built up by the confusion of “to be able to experience the perfect Monty.”
Other services on the phone include AI from Google Cloud, ElevenLabs and Picsart, DT said.
Magenta AI, the app-based version of DT’s AI Assistant, will be available to those who want to install it on their Android or iOS devices, as long as they are one of DT’s 300 million customers.
We are leaning against the current trends on everything about AI, a broad theme at MWC this year. AI phones are DT’s latest attempts to gain a stronger foothold alongside consumers around fixed hardware when users are unable to purchase their devices.
To the point of confusion, the company competes with the very impressive Openai and humanity when it comes to building new AI tools for consumers, when it comes to building big companies like Google, which burned Gemini AI into basic search products. So, at least for now, when you move to “action” services, you will work with the telephone company to get a little point of distinction.
Here, it appears to be baffled by the next step in how AI can improve the user experience.
“These are the kinds of things you have to learn how to use these different apps and do it in your own way,” Srinivas said. “All of these things start to allow us to concentrate our time and energy on problem solving… This is really the next phase of AI. [is] Just being reactive, you will be able to move from typing prompts to what is there natively on your phone and always listen to you and be able to […] Please be proactive in helping you. ”
It remains to be seen whether DT and confusion will be able to crack the infamous tricky smartphone market, dominated by a few companies and has been seen over the years, like LG Cash and Away Away.
Nevertheless, it shows how AI pull is magnetic now, even legacy companies see it as a possible panacea, and that cutting-edge startups are looking for a safe moat amidst the fierce competition.
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