Initiative overview
MERaLiON is designed with features that understand Southeast Asia's diverse languages, cultures, and nuances. The model incorporates code-switching capabilities to handle natural language mixing across the region, and is emotionally intelligent, able to detect emotional tone, gender, and paralinguistic features in speech. It is also fine-tuned with industry-specific data to ensure contextual relevance and accuracy. Additional capabilities include multilingual speech transcription and translation, speech summarisation, audio scene understanding, and local speech recognition covering regional accents, dialects, and colloquialisms.
To ensure broader impact and accelerate adoption, the Singapore government announced the establishment of a Consortium led by A*STAR, bringing together private sector partners (DBS Bank, Grab, ST Engineering, NCS, and SPH Media Trust), alongside the Ministry of Health. The Consortium aims to harness ecosystem expertise and share learnings across sectors. Further Southeast Asian language coverage is planned for future releases.
