Published: Jul 08, 2025

giving AI a Southeast Asian voice

As AI continues to evolve, it must become more than accurate; it must become empathetic. Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network (MERaLiON), Singapore’s new multimodal AI model, represents a major step toward that future. Designed to recognise vocal, emotional and cultural nuances across Southeast Asia’s diverse languages, MERaLiON is being piloted by a public-private consortium to explore high-impact use cases from multilingual customer support to elder care and financial services.
 

• MERaLiON is a multimodal AI model built to understand emotion, context and cultural nuance across Southeast Asian languages.
• NCS is part of the founding consortium exploring real-world use cases, from governments to enterprises and telcos.
• The model supports seven major regional languages and can detect emotion through pitch, tone and volume.
• Emotional intelligence and multilingual support are key to human-centric AI adoption in Southeast Asia.
• The model is open source and backed by Singapore’s national AI infrastructure and partners.
   

Most LLMs struggle with emotion and nuance, especially in the highly diverse, multilingual context of Southeast Asia. Built by A*STAR I²R with support from IMDA and the National Research Foundation, MERaLiON was created to address this issue.

Trained on open-source models and voice data from Singapore’s National Speech Corpus, MERaLiON understands tone, emotion, cultural context and language mixing (e.g. English-Chinese, Singlish), making it particularly well-suited for real-time voice interactions in fields like customer service, healthcare and elder care.
 

As a founding member of the MERaLiON Consortium, NCS is focused on real-world enterprise adoption. That means going beyond demos and research to test MERaLiON’s performance in complex, high-stakes environments where accuracy, cultural sensitivity and data privacy are non-negotiable.

Working alongside agencies and industry players, NCS is exploring how MERaLiON can:

• Enhance multilingual customer engagement with emotional context.
• Detect regulatory shifts and perform insight extraction from complex documents.
• Unify multilingual content across internal systems.
• Ensure secure deployment with enterprise-grade safeguards.

By applying a systems lens, NCS helps evaluate how MERaLiON performs not just in isolation but as part of a larger AI stack. This includes integration with internal workflows, performance tuning and measuring deployment cost and resilience.
 

• Axiom IT Solutions developed a system to check in on elderly residents via voice calls, detecting emotion in real time and escalating concerns to caregivers.
• SCAM Call Protect uses MERaLiON to detect potential fraud and protect vulnerable users.
• DBS Bank is testing use cases around personalised recommendations and service interactions tailored to Southeast Asian languages and cultural behaviours.
   

MERaLiON shows what’s possible when AI speaks with empathy and in the languages people actually use. NCS is helping move it from lab to life, putting the model into enterprise workflows, measuring its impact and shaping a future where AI feels as local as it is powerful.