German Telekom, the major operator in Germany (parent company of T-Mobile), has announced a collaboration with Perplexity to develop a smartphone called the “AI Phone” together.
The core of the AI Phone is the Magenta AI feature (named after the color of the company Deutsche Telekom), which is a comprehensive AI service familiar to us today. It incorporates multiple AI systems from various companies. Its main core is the Perplexity Assistant, the personal assistant system of Perplexity (referred to as a co-pilot but in a smaller scale). In the future, it will add AI systems from other companies, including:
– The voice generation system from ElevenLabs used to create its own podcasts.
– The AI-generated image feature from Picsart.
– The Gemini Multimodal Live feature, a camera that captures the world around it (Project Astra) from Google Cloud AI.
Deutsche Telekom has stated that they will integrate Magenta AI into the smartphones they will launch this year (from the images shown, it’s running on Android without specifying the brand, and it’s unclear if it will include iPhones). Users can access Magenta AI by pressing a button on the lock screen or pressing the power button twice. Existing smartphone users who are not ready to upgrade can also download the MeinMagenta app to use it.
Furthermore, there will be an AI Phone brand by Deutsche Telekom itself, set to be unveiled in 2025 and officially released in 2026, with a price tag of less than $1,000.
Source: Deutsche Telekom, TechCrunch
TLDR: German Telekom partners with Perplexity to develop the AI Phone, integrating Magenta AI and planning to launch their own AI Phone brand in 2026 at a price point below $1,000.
Leave a Comment