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MERaLiON at the 3rd Annual Healthcare AI Symposium
MERaLiON | 15 July 2026
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MERaLiON was featured at the 3rd Annual Healthcare AI Symposium, hosted by A*STAR Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (A*STAR IAIC) in Singapore from 8-9 July 2026, where researchers, clinicians, industry leaders and innovators came together to explore how AI can shape the future of healthcare delivery.
Over the course of the symposium, we had the chance to connect with the wider healthcare AI community and share how MERaLiON's multilingual, multimodal capabilities are already being put to work in the sector, from interpreting local languages and dialects in patient interactions to supporting outreach and care coordination use cases. The discussions and demos throughout the event echoed something we hear often from our own consortium partners: AI only matters in healthcare if it can be translated into tools that clinicians and patients can actually use.
Over the course of the symposium, we had the chance to connect with the wider healthcare AI community and share how MERaLiON's multilingual, multimodal capabilities are already being put to work in the sector, from interpreting local languages and dialects in patient interactions to supporting outreach and care coordination use cases. The discussions and demos throughout the event echoed something we hear often from our own consortium partners: AI only matters in healthcare if it can be translated into tools that clinicians and patients can actually use.
We were glad to see Mr Kiat How Tan, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Digital Development and Information & Ministry of Health, deliver the Guest-of-Honour address, and to spend time with the speakers, partners and innovators who made this year's symposium such a strong showing for Singapore's healthcare AI ecosystem. Mr Kiat How Tan was shown a live demo on how MERaLiON benefits healthcare use cases given our model strength in paralinguistic cues, local languages including dialects like Hokkien, and discussed the possible applications.
Events like this reinforce why we keep building MERaLiON with healthcare as one of our core use cases, and we're looking forward to deepening these collaborations in the months ahead.
MERaLiON celebrates the launch of ASPIRE 2B
MERaLiON | 22 June 2026
Source: Channel NewsAsia
ASPIRE 2B offers roughly four times the combined computing capacity of its predecessors, ASPIRE 2A and 2A+, a leap that opens up real possibilities for the next phase of MERaLiON's work.
Powered by NSCC’s ASPIRE 2A+, the MERaLiON team has released MERaLiON AudioLLM v3, a Southeast Asia-focused voice-first multilingual model capable of transcription, translation, summarisation and question answering, with the ability to interpret regional accents, dialects, colloquialisms and code-switching. The v3 series also includes the Text to Speech capability for local dialects such as Hokkien, contributing to use cases in healthcare and social services.
MERaLiON supports 21 products across sectors ranging from finance, healthcare, public safety to enterprise applications, with deployments in areas such as community outreach and social services where it helps automate routine check-in calls and enhance outreach operations.
To date, the MERaLiON team has released twelve models and two datasets on Hugging Face, collectively achieving close to a million downloads, and established an 18-member consortium to drive real-world applications across healthcare, banking, mobility, media and homeland security.
None of that would have been possible without the compute NSCC has provided from day one, and the team looks forward to continuing that partnership with NSCC on ASPIRE 2B. With ASPIRE 2B, the team will be able to train larger and more advanced multimodal models, cover more underserved languages, accelerate development of next-generation end-to-end models and complex AI systems, and pursue richer capabilities including deeper audio-visual understanding and emotion-aware contextual reasoning, advancing Singapore’s ability to translate sovereign AI research into impactful national applications.
MERaLiON continues to advance multilingual and multimodal AI from Singapore to the region
MERaLiON | 25 May 2026
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What if AI could understand not just what you say - but why you say it? One year on, MERaLiON continues to advance multilingual and multimodal AI from Singapore to the region. At ATxSG 2026, A*STAR I²R showcased the latest evolution of MERaLiON - moving beyond traditional speech recognition into deeper audio intelligence and real-world deployment.
From Speech Understanding to Speech Synthesis
AudioLLM v3
Goes beyond what is said to how and why it is said, interpreting speaker attributes, age groups, music, and emotional states for richer audio intelligence.
AudioLLM-3B-ASR
A lightweight real-time streaming model optimised for deployment, with improved ASR performance across Hokkien, Cantonese and Thai, and support for longer audio inputs.
MERaLiON-TTS
A breakthrough in speech synthesis - enabling Mandarin-to-Hokkien speech generation with natural, locally fluent output.
From Research to Real-World Impact
Driving adoption across finance, public safety, enterprise productivity and community applications - including a common AI model for the financial sector developed with consortium partners, alongside use cases in eldercare outreach and scam awareness education.
Scaling Adoption
MERaLiON is now available via cloud APIs to enable faster experimentation and enterprise adoption.
It is also being extended to the edge through Apple Silicon - enabling scalable, efficient and privacy-preserving deployment across healthcare, field operations and emergency response.
At ATxSG 2026, visitors experienced these capabilities across finance, public safety, healthcare and community applications.
The MERaLiON Xperience event also brought together over 100 participants to explore real-world applications of multimodal AI.
From research to deployment, MERaLiON reflects a growing ecosystem working together to bring contextual, multilingual AI into everyday impact.
MERaLiON AudioLLM is taking the next leap forward in audio intelligence
MERaLiON | 26 February 2026
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Evolving beyond speech recognition, MERaLiON now delivers paralinguistic intelligence for local and Southeast Asian languages, together with audio understanding of sound events and acoustic environments - bringing us closer to a truly general-purpose Audio LLM.
Importantly, these advances build on the strong foundations of AudioLLM v2. Today, MERaLiON does more than transcription. It understands how it is said, the age group of the speaker, and the context of the surrounding environment. From genuine laughter to a distressed chuckle, it captures the real emotion behind the sound - enabling richer, more meaningful insights from real-world audio.
This marks an important step towards AI systems that can listen, interpret, and reason in a more human-like way.
Read more about MERaLiON-3-10B-preview here.
Advancing MERaLiON: Highlights from our 2nd Consortium Meeting
MERaLiON | 26 February 2026
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We were delighted to host our latest MERaLiON Consortium Meeting with 60 attendees including representatives from our 17 consortium members and guests.
Launch of AUDIO LLM v3 preview
We previewed our new Audio LLM v3 model, extending MERaLiON’s multimodal capabilities to interpret paralinguistic cues and detect events within speech. A live demo showcased how the model can identify cynical laughter embedded within conversation - offering a glimpse into the speaker’s emotional undertones beyond just words.
Advancing MERaLiON and Accelerating Adoption through APIs
Advancing MERaLiON and Accelerating Adoption through APIs
We shared updates on the availability of APIs to support trials and accelerate real-world adoption. At the same time, development is underway for MERaLiON2-Omni (Alpha) - our next-generation multimodal engine purpose-built for Southeast Asia.
Projects and Real-World Use Cases Across Sectors
Consortium members - NCS, EmbeddedLLM, Lions Befrienders & Axiom IT Solutions, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) & Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) with participating banks, MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), Microsoft - shared how they are leveraging MERaLiON’s strong capabilities in interpreting code-switched languages and emotional context across diverse use cases:
- Supporting mental health helplines in healthcare
- Enhancing scam detection
- Powering AI automated bots for elderly check-in calls
- Transcribing conversations to improve operational workflows in banks
- Supporting ease of user trials through offering an API trial service platform
MAS and A*STAR I²R develop AI for Singlish transcription in FinTech
MERaLiON | 13 November 2025
Source: Singapore Fintech Festival
At the Singapore FinTech Festival, Mr Chia Der Jiun, Managing Director of Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), highlighted a shared challenge across the financial industry: Singapore’s unique and multilingual linguistic landscape.
A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R) is responding by co-developing a Voice-to-Text AI model with financial institutions, pooling data, talent and sector insights to transcribe Singlish and commonly spoken local languages and dialects accurately. This collaboration aims to create more robust, locally tuned models that enhance customer experience.
This innovation opens new opportunities for the financial sector, from automating call-centre operations to ensuring precise record-keeping for regulated conversations, driving greater efficiency, compliance and transparency.
Read more about it here.
Read more about it here.
The MERaLiON team is currently working with MAS and several of our key finance institutions to jointly develop this common AI model to serve the needs of our finance sectors.
We welcome more financial institutions to reach out and join us in this effort.
MERaLiON at SWITCH 2025
MERaLiON | 30 October 2025
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We were proud to showcase MERaLiON at Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) 2025!
Our event highlights included:
• A live demo of MERaLiON - trained on four local and other Southeast Asian languages - illustrating how the multimodal AI listens and responds beyond text as it captures both linguistic and paralinguistic cues, offering a glimpse into the human-like intelligence behind its architecture. This features the open-sourcing of MERaLiON-SER-v1 specializing in emotion detection for local languages.
• A panel discussion announcing the start of 5 industry projects with MERaLiON Consortium Members: HTX (Home Team Science & Technology Agency), ST Engineering, NCS Group, Axiom IT Solutions Pte Ltd, and Embedded LLM. Their use cases range from emergency responses, public safety, healthcare, elder-care and FMCG - MERaLiON will be used to transcribe conversations more accurately and even analyze emotional response through verbal cues. Some of these projects also aim to expand our capabilities in other languages such as Thai. The panel included Mr Kian Boon Lim, Chief Data Officer and Deputy Chief AI Officer from HTX, Mr Boon Leong Tan, MTech (KE), Vice President of ST Engineering, Mr Sunil Sivadas, Ph.D. Practice Lead for NEXT Gen Tech, NCS, and Mr Lewis Won from A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R). Moderated by Angela Chee (A*STAR), the discussion highlighted adoption challenges for LLMs and how consortium ecosystem can translate innovation into commercial impact with speed and scale.
The Consortium, together with its members, is continuing to work closely to co-create the next frontier of AI and unlock meaningful commercial value.
Joining the Conversation at the vLLM Meetup SG Meet Up
MERaLiON | 27 August 2025
Our MERaLiON team had an enriching time at the vLLM Meetup in Singapore, hosted by Embedded LLM and supported by SGInnovate.
We joined the conversation on advancing efficient large language model LLM serving, sharing how we use vLLM together with Ray to power MERaLiON inference. Insights included methods for scheduling, managing throughput and latency, and scaling across different model sizes to meet real-world applications.
Beyond the knowledge exchange, it was also a valuable opportunity to connect with peers in the AI community, exchange ideas on optimisation techniques, and learn how others are advancing the frontiers of LLM deployment.
Launch of MERaLiON at ATxSummit2025
MERaLiON | 29 May 2025
At ATxSummit2025, Minister Josephine Teo announced two key milestones in Singapore's national Large Language Model (LLM) journey: the launch of the MERaLiON Consortium and MERaLiON 2.0.
Developed by A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R) and supported by IMDA, MERaLiON is a multimodal, empathetic LLM built for Southeast Asia - with upgraded support for languages like Malay, Tamil, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese, alongside English, Mandarin, and Singlish. These upgrades enable more intuitive, culturally aware AI solutions tailored to Southeast Asia, with applications across customer experience, healthcare, social services, and more.
The newly launched MERaLiON Consortium brings together industry leaders like Grab, DBS Bank, Microsoft Singapore, MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), and SPH Media to explore practical applications in areas such as multilingual customer support, health and emotional insight detection, and agentic decision-making - helping to deliver more inclusive, intuitive, and impactful digital experiences across Southeast Asia.