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MAS and A*STAR I²R develop AI for Singlish transcription in FinTech
13 Nov 2025
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
30 Oct 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
27 Aug 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
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.