It was inevitable that this 12 months at MWC in Barcelona, a minimum of one provider would announce a serious effort at constructing a smartphone with a serious AI firm. And right here it’s: T-Cell, the cell telco owned by Deutsche Telekom, mentioned that it’s constructing an “AI Phone”, a low-cost handset created in shut collaboration with Perplexity, together with Black Forest Labs, Picsart and others; plus a brand new AI assistant app it’s calling “Magenta AI.” T-Cell mentioned it should unveil the system within the second half of this 12 months, and it’ll begin promoting it in 2026 for a price ticket of lower than $1,000.
“We are becoming an AI company,” Claudia Nemat, a DT board Member who oversees tech and innovation, mentioned in a press convention Monday. It’s not constructing foundational giant language fashions, she was fast so as to add, “but we do the AI agents.”
Notably, Perplexity is enjoying a key position within the growth of the cellphone — a sign of how the startup, recognized greatest right this moment for its generative AI search engine — is making efforts to construct extra “proactive” merchandise.
“Perplexity is transitioning from just being an answer machine to an action machine,” the startup’s CEO Aravind Srinivas mentioned on stage on the occasion. “It is going to start doing things for you, not just answering questions. It’s going to be able to book flights for you, book reservations for you, send emails for you, send messages, place phone calls for you, and all those sort of things like set smart reminders.”
Nemat didn’t get into many particulars of the {hardware} — no system specs, no data on who’s constructing it nor what OS it should run on (from the image right here it seems to be like a taste of Android). However she did word that the cellphone will value “much less than the above $1,000” which might be the everyday value tags on gadgets just like the iPhone.
The cellphone may have AI baked into the way it, with the expertise constructed by Perplexity “so that you can experience the full Monty,” she added. “AI on your lock screen.”
Different companies on the cellphone will embrace Google Cloud AI, ElevenLabs and Picsart, the corporate mentioned.
Magenta AI, which can be an app-based model of T-Cell’s AI assistant, can be out there for individuals who need to set up it on their very own Android or iOS gadgets — so long as you might be already one among T-Cell’s 300 million prospects, Nemat mentioned.
The information is the most recent growth in a well-recognized story from the world of telecoms. For years, carriers — each cell and glued — have pined for tactics to compete higher with expertise corporations. Particularly, they’ve centered on the likes of Apple and Google, which have been working techniques and telephones that largely lower telecoms corporations out of the equation on the subject of being profitable round apps, and “owning” that buyer relationship.
(And their ire is just not solely educated on these two. Deutsche Telekom has been in a long-running authorized dispute with Meta in Germany over the costs that Meta pays to hold site visitors over DT’s community within the nation.)
Leaning into the present vogue for all issues AI — which is a pervasive theme at MWC this 12 months — this cellphone is DT’s newest try to achieve some stronger footing of its personal.
However shifting quick is just not actually within the playbook right here. Perplexity and Deutsche Telekom have been working collectively since inking a partnership in April 2024. And DT first talked about this AI Cellphone a full 12 months in the past, eventually 12 months’s Cell World Congress occasion.
For Perplexity, the corporate has not simply to compete with the likes of the very well-capitalised OpenAI and Anthropic on the subject of constructing new AI instruments for shoppers; but additionally huge tech corporations like Google, which has baked in its Gemini AI into its fundamental search expertise. So right here, it appears that evidently Perplexity is leaning into the subsequent part of how AI can enhance consumer expertise.
“These are the kinds of things that earlier you would have to do in your own way, learning how to use these different apps,” Srinivas mentioned. “All these things are going to start becoming easier so that you can focus your time and energy on problem solving…. This is really the next phase where AI are going to transition from being just reactive and having you input prompts into something that’s just natively there on your phone, always listening to you and being able to be proactively assist you.”
It stays to be seen whether or not T-Cell or Perplexity will be capable to crack the notoriously difficult smartphone market, which is dominated by a small variety of corporations and has over time even seen leviathans like LG money of their chips and again away. It nonetheless factors to simply how magnetic the AI pull is true now, and the way even essentially the most legacy corporations see it as a doable panacea. And the way even essentially the most cutting-edge startups are on the lookout for secure moats amid fierce competitors of their market.
