It was inevitable that this 12 months at MWC in Barcelona, not less than one provider would announce a significant effort at constructing a smartphone with a prime AI firm. And right here it’s: T-Cellular, the cellular telco owned by Deutsche Telekom (DT), stated that it’s constructing an “AI Telephone,” a low-cost handset created in shut collaboration with Perplexity, together with Picsart and others, plus a brand new AI assistant app it’s calling “Magenta AI.”
T-Cellular stated it is going to unveil the gadget within the second half of this 12 months, and it’ll begin promoting it in 2026 for a price ticket of lower than $1,000.
“We have gotten an AI firm,” Claudia Nemat, a DT board member who oversees tech and innovation on the telecom, stated throughout a press convention Monday. It’s not constructing foundational giant language fashions, she was fast so as to add, “however we do the AI brokers.”
The information is the most recent growth in a well-known story from the world of telecoms. For years, carriers — each cellular and stuck — have pined for methods to compete higher with expertise firms. Particularly, they’ve targeted on the likes of Apple and Google, which have created working programs and telephones that largely minimize telecom firms out of the equation on the subject of making a living round apps, and “proudly owning” that buyer relationship.
Notably, Perplexity is taking part in a key function within the growth of the cellphone — a sign of how the startup, greatest identified as we speak for its generative AI search engine, is taking steps to create extra “proactive” merchandise.
Perplexity and Deutsche Telekom have been working collectively since inking a partnership in April 2024. And DT first talked about an “AI Telephone” a full 12 months in the past, eventually 12 months’s Cellular World Congress occasion.
“Perplexity is transitioning from simply being a solution machine to an motion machine,” Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s co-founder and CEO, stated on stage on the occasion. “It’ll begin doing issues for you, not simply answering questions. It’s going to have the ability to e-book flights for you, e-book reservations for you, ship emails for you, ship messages, place cellphone requires you, and all these types of issues, like set good reminders.”
Nemat didn’t get into many particulars of the {hardware}, like gadget specs, nor did she give info on who’s constructing it and what working system it is going to run on (from the idea renderings, it seems to be like a taste of Android). However she did be aware that the cellphone may have AI baked in, with the expertise constructed by Perplexity “so that you could expertise the complete Monty,” she added: “AI in your lock display screen.”
Different providers on the cellphone will embrace AI from Google Cloud, ElevenLabs, and Picsart, T-Cellular stated.
Magenta AI, which will probably be an app-based model of T-Cellular’s AI assistant, will probably be obtainable for individuals who wish to set up it on their very own Android or iOS units — so long as you might be already one in every of T-Cellular’s 300 million prospects, Nemat stated.
Leaning into the present vogue for all issues AI — which is a pervasive theme at MWC this 12 months — the AI Telephone is DT’s newest try to achieve some stronger footing. For Perplexity, the corporate is competing with the likes of not simply the very-well-capitalised OpenAI and Anthropic on the subject of constructing new AI instruments for customers, but in addition huge tech firms like Google, which has baked its Gemini AI into its primary search merchandise.
Right here, evidently Perplexity is leaning into the subsequent part of how AI can enhance person expertise.
“These are the sorts of issues that, earlier, you would need to do in your personal manner, studying use these totally different apps,” Srinivas stated. “All this stuff are going to begin turning into simpler so that you could focus your time and power on problem-solving…. That is actually the subsequent part the place AI [is] going to transition from being simply reactive and having you enter prompts into one thing that’s simply natively there in your cellphone, at all times listening to you and with the ability to […] proactively help you.”
It stays to be seen whether or not T-Cellular, Perplexity, or each will be capable of crack the notoriously difficult smartphone market, which is dominated by a small variety of firms and has through the years seen even leviathans like LG money of their chips and again away. It nonetheless factors to simply how magnetic the AI pull is correct now, how even legacy firms see it as a potential panacea, and the way even cutting-edge startups are in search of protected moats amid fierce competitors.
