Singlish-savvy AI chatbot helps seniors, blocks scam calls in Singapore

Meralion is available for the public to install for free to adapt for their use.PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO via The Straits Times/Asia News Network

SINGAPORE – Artificial intelligence agents trained to speak in English, local mother tongue languages, and even Singlish, may soon be deployed to call elderly patients or seniors to check in on how they are doing, or at anti-scam centers to intercept suspicious calls.

“I’ve been told (the chatbot) can also handle non-verbal cues such as the speaker’s volume, emotion and tone,” said Digital Development and Information Minister Josephine Teo, unveiling the chatbot on May 28 at the Asia Tech x Singapore conference held at Capella Singapore.

Called Meralion (short for Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network), the chatbot can understand at least eight regional languages such as English, Mandarin, Tamil, Malay, Thai and Singlish – Singapore’s unique take on English which fuses regional languages.

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Meralion, which is developed by the A*Star Institute for Infocomm Research, is available for the public to install for free to adapt for their use. Talks are also under way with a social service agency to deploy the chatbot.

For instance, Meralion can help social workers ring seniors to remind them to take their medication. The AI program, which works autonomously, can also check in on the seniors’ well-being, analysing their tone and dialogue for signs of sadness or anger that might require closer attention from human staff. The chatbot will generate a summary of the call, detailing the senior’s needs and well-being.

Meralion’s development is part of a $70 million initiative funded by the National Research Foundation and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), which aims to build large language models tailored for the region. The fund has also backed AI Singapore’s Sea-Lion (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) model, which is trained on at least 11 major languages used in the region.

The Meralion chatbot fills a gap for locally attuned language models as most current AI systems are trained largely on Western data, said Dr Lawrence Wee, director of business and ecosystems at IMDA’s BizTech Group.

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As a result, chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini that dominate the fast-growing AI field may often stumble over local dialects, communication styles and nuances, so deploying them here often requires extensive retraining on regional data.

Meralion, which is trained on the national speech corpus, understands when multiple languages are spoken in the same sentence, reflecting how people in the region naturally communicate.

It can also detect emotional tone to enable more empathetic interactions with the chatbot, said IMDA and A*Star. They added that in future updates, Meralion is being trained to understand Chinese dialects.

Mrs Teo, who is Minister-in-charge of Smart Nation and Cybersecurity, said the Meralion chatbot can serve the needs of more than 450 million people in the region who use these languages.

In a demonstration on May 26, the media was shown how Meralion can be deployed in eldercare and anti-scam efforts.

The social services AI bot asked the caller how he was feeling and understood his Singlish reply, which included a lament on his early start to the day: “I wake up at 6 and make my kopi-o” (black coffee).

The bot responded in Singlish: “Aiyoh, so sayang… Hope your kopi-o helped. Have you eaten? Remember to take care of yourself, okay?”

For more severe concerns such as body aches, the bot can give basic advice, such as to rest or to ice bruises. Urgent cases can be flagged directly to social workers, depending on how the program is implemented.

Axiom IT Solutions, which is using Meralion to develop new AI apps, is in talks with a social service agency, which it did not identify, to deploy the AI chatbot for eldercare.

In a separate demonstration, Meralion was used to screen likely scam calls to prevent scammers from reaching victims over the phone.

If a call seems suspicious, Meralion answers, identifies itself as an AI assistant, and asks the caller to state his or her purpose. The bot assesses the purpose of the call before deciding whether to let the call through or to block it.

Meralion can also block calls made by bots, often used by scammers to target victims en masse.

It is yet to be seen how potential clients will implement the technology. Telcos might employ it to screen suspicious calls before they reach users who opt in for the security service, or as an app to filter calls, said Mr Lam Pang Ngean, business development director at Axiom IT Solutions, which is among Meralion’s users using the platform to create apps for potential clients.

An earlier version of Meralion has been downloaded more than 90,000 times by start-ups, research labs and academics, among other users, since it was rolled out as an open-source tool last December.

Speaking to several hundred tech policymakers, researchers and industry guests in attendance at the conference, Mrs Teo said: “Furthermore, (Meralion’s latest version) understands sentences containing a mix of languages, which is common in multicultural societies.”

“It’s very unusual for us to complete a whole sentence using just one language,” she said, adding that there are more than 1,200 languages and dialects in Southeast Asia.

Meralion follows in the footsteps of Sea-Lion, another large language model designed to reflect local cultures. The open-source Sea-Lion software has been installed more than 200,000 times, said Mrs Teo, adding that the interest in a regionally attuned model indicated a demand for a new AI program capable of understanding speech, text and other modes of communication.

Organized by IMDA, the ATxSG conference, held from May 27 to 29, is expected to host 3,500 attendees from around the world who will attend panels and discussions on AI governance and innovation in the technology sector. Executives from major tech companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are also scheduled to attend panel discussions that address pressing issues in tech.

Mrs Teo also announced the Meralion Consortium, which comprises 12 member organizations including DBS Bank, the Ministry of Health’s Office for Healthcare Transformation and ST Engineering. It will work with Meralion’s developers to refine the AI model so that it can be used by member companies and their sectors.

The consortium will focus on multilingual customer support, analysing speech and text for emotional cues to support well-being and care and to improve the AI’s decision-making ability by factoring in cultural contexts.

Microsoft, one of the consortium’s members, is working with A*Star on how Meralion can be woven into its suite of office tools.

SPH Media, which publishes The Straits Times, is also exploring ways to use Meralion to support AI apps in user experience and customer service tools, said chief operating officer Loh Yuh Yiing. /dl