Singapore shares advances in AI infrastructure-building

Source: IMDA. Minister Teo delivered the opening address at ATxSummit 2025. In her speech, she outlined three ways in which the public sector has seen good returns from AI: providing broad-based access and skills training, strengthening core AI expertise in technical government agencies, and actively transforming parts of the public service through AI, including for homeland security and healthcare.

At the ATxSummit 2025, the flagship event of Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG), Mrs Josephine Teo, Singapore Minister for Digital Development and Information, unveiled updates to Singapore’s large language model - Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network (MERaLiON) - and launched the MERaLiON Consortium.

She also announced new global initiatives and collaborations which strengthen Singapore’s AI ecosystem and accelerate responsible AI adoption, putting Singapore at the forefront of efforts to operationalise AI safety, accelerate capability development, and promote international cooperation for AI.

MERaLiON, a large language model (LLM) developed by A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R) and supported by IMDA, boosted regional AI capabilities with new enhanced multilingual processing and emotional intelligence capabilities. The model now handles Malay, Tamil, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese on top of English, Mandarin and Singlish, with advanced code-switching abilities and emotion recognition features.

These improvements are expected to enable more intuitive and culturally-aware AI applications in Southeast Asia, with use cases in the customer service, social service, and marketing sectors.

To accelerate adoption, IMDA and A*STAR I²R have set up the MERaLiON Consortium, a collaborative platform that brings together local and global industry players and research and development (R&D) institutions like HTX, MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), NCS, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, SPH Media and ST Engineering with leading technology companies like Axiom IT Solutions, BytePlus, CommonTown, DBS Bank, Grab and Microsoft Singapore.

The consortium will focus on developing practical AI applications, from multilingual customer support to health and emotional insight detection and agentic decision-making systems.

- Axiom IT Solutions has two AI applications powered by MERaLiON targeted at the elderly. The first monitors emotional wellbeing by analysing emotions during courtesy calls, alerting caregivers to distress signals or warning signs for timely intervention. The system can understand various local languages and dialects. The second protects against SCAM calls by identifying and blocking fraudulent attempts, ensuring safety and reducing risks.

“MERaLiON seamlessly integrates into our AI voice applications for elderly care, elevating their ability to comprehend various local languages and dialects. Beyond improved linguistic understanding, it empowers our AI to analyse emotional states, facilitating early detection of distress, enabling alerts and timely interventions by caregivers," said Lam Pang Ngean, Director, Axiom IT Solutions.

"Additionally, MERaLiON has been incorporated into our SCAM Call Protect solution, designed to safeguard the elderly from fraudulent calls. Collaborations with social service agencies are underway to bring these enhancements to life, unlocking boundless possibilities for impactful innovation.”

- BytePlus is exploring ways MERaLiON’s multilingual transcription, translation, and paralinguistic-detection capabilities could complement its existing AI solutions for interactive digital experiences and customer engagement.

Potential applications include real-time transcription and translation for Southeast Asian languages, speech summarisation to streamline video workflows, and emotion or speaker-count insights to enhance audience analytics.

Gao Yan, Regional Lead, Singapore and Thailand, BytePlus said: "At BytePlus, we are deeply committed to fostering an AI landscape that thrives on innovation, diversity, and inclusivity. As a founding member of the MERaLiON Consortium, we're proud to contribute our deep technical expertise, proven industry knowledge, and locally-optimised solutions to empower Southeast Asia's first multimodal LLM. This collaboration is crucial as we accelerate the development and deployment of culturally-attuned AI that benefits everyone in the region and beyond."

- CommonTown has successfully deployed a suite of learning and school applications equipped with automatic speech recognition (ASR) to support teaching, learning and communication. MERaLiON can be integrated into these platforms to provide accurate transcription and voice interaction features that cater to Singapore’s multilingual environment. This enables more inclusive and efficient engagement with thousands of students, educators and parents, while enhancing accessibility and the overall digital learning experience.

Said Joel Loo, CommonTown's CEO and founder: “CommonTown serves a diverse range of clients across Singapore and Southeast Asia with our edtech and centre management products. By integrating MERaLiON's localised and empathetic ASR features and collaborating with other consortium members, CommonTown will enhance its products and expand its market reach. We also look forward to partnering with consortium members to create innovative new products and services.” 

- DBS Bank sees potential in experimenting with MERaLiON in use cases from personalised financial and product recommendations to seamless customer servicing across languages and cultures. It would enhance clarity, empathy and relevance in every interaction, including conversational, the bank said.

“Understanding local nuance, context and culture isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s a human one. DBS is delighted to be the only bank to join this pioneering effort in building and testing out a large language model that truly reflects our local voice – because innovation must speak the language of the people it serves,” said Bidyut Dumra, Group Head of
Innovation, DBS Bank.

Since its initial release in December 2024, MERaLiON’s first version has garnered over 90,000 downloads globally, attracting users from corporate research labs, media service providers, startups, and academics. Organisations can engage with tuned MERaLiON models via the Consortium, or implement the open source model. 

AI safety

In the area of AI safety, the 2025 Singapore Conference on AI: International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety in April 2025 led to global cooperation in identifying and prioritising research domains, which culminated in the publication of The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities (The Singapore Consensus). Research domains were categorised into three buckets across the AI lifecycle – risk assessment, development of trustworthy AI systems, and post-deployment monitoring and intervention.

The Singapore Consensus is a living document that will serve as the foundation for the ATxSG Government-to-Government (G2G) Ministerial Roundtable on Digital Trust which seeks to bridge science to policy, and translate technical research into practical policies, by facilitating meaningful conversations between AI scientists and policymakers.

Singapore is also continuing its efforts to align international AI governance frameworks. The AI Verify Testing Framework was first introduced in 2022 for traditional AI. It has since been enhanced to address both generative AI (gen AI) and traditional AI risks. 

In continued collaboration with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), IMDA has further developed a crosswalk to map the enhanced Framework with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework: Gen AI Profile. This reaffirms the alignment between the two countries’ AI governance frameworks and reflects a shared commitment to cooperation, IMDA said.

Together, these initiatives underscore Singapore’s commitment to building foundational infrastructure for AI safety development and testing that is grounded in scientific evidence; and uniting researchers, policymakers, and businesses to co-develop implementable, interoperable frameworks for responsible AI at scale.

To strengthen global digital trust, Singapore’s AI Safety Institute signed a joint statement with France’s AI Safety Institute to kickstart collaboration and cooperation on AI safety and cooperation on 28 May 2025. The joint statement was signed between Minister Teo, and French Minister Delegate of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologues, Mrs Clara Chappaz at ATx 2025. 

Cross-border data privacy

A second global agreement was with Singapore and the US, around Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) Certification for businesses to facilitate trusted cross-border data flows, providing access to nine economies with about US$40 T in market size and counting. It will allow organisations to demonstrate compliance with internationally-recognised data protection standards.

The Global CBPR Certification was announced at ATxSG and developed by the Global CBPR Forum, of which Singapore serves as deputy chair. As Singapore’s Accountability Agent, IMDA will be the contact point for organisations interested to apply for this certification. Applications are accepted from 2 June 2025.

“The launch of the Global CBPR and Global PRP systems empowers companies worldwide to uphold the highest standards of data privacy, fosters trust, enables trade and drives innovation in a connected future. We encourage companies operating in the global market to consider becoming certified and jurisdictions to join the Forum to make this tool available to companies in their jurisdictions,” said Shannon Coes, Chair, Global CBPR Forum.

Organisations such as OCBC, IBM and Mastercard are currently certified under the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation CBPR certification and will be certified under the Global CBPR certification.

“The Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) enables a framework of interoperable data protection rules across the region and the world with a potential to drive significant business value. As the first company to be certified by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CBPR System in 2013, IBM holds itself accountable and has earned the trust of those who provide us with their personal data. Our privacy practices are outlined in our Privacy Statement. We will continue to follow core principles, grounded in commitments to trust and transparency,” noted Ajay Dua, VP & Assistant General Counsel, Asia Pacific & China, IBM.

"Robust safeguards and a uniform framework for personal data across borders are crucial for secure and efficient data flows. The Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules certification programme is a significant step forward, enabling businesses to demonstrate their commitment to data privacy and build trust with customers.

"As an APEC CBPR certified company, OCBC has strong measures in place to safeguard customer data. We're working towards global CBPR certification and expect to be one of the first in Singapore to attain it. We encourage other companies to follow suit, as a large network of certified companies will unlock the full potential of the global CBPR and facilitate secure and seamless data transfers," said Loretta Yuen, Head of Group Legal & Compliance, OCBC.

“We’re excited for the official launch of the Global CBPRs as it sets a baseline for privacy protection around the world. Data free flows with trust is essential for our global economy to flourish,” stated Harvey Jang, VP, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer, Cisco Systems. 

Healthcare

In other event-related news, Enigma Health, a spinoff from SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre, signed two strategic partnerships with Roche and ST Engineering’s Enterprise Digital to expand its reach and capabilities on 27 May 2025. This was announced by Rahayu Mahzam, Singapore Minister of State for Digital Development and Information at the Scaling and Sustaining Healthcare with Gen AI symposium held at ATxSG.

Enigma Health's new partnerships will accelerate clinical trials, market access, insights and business intelligence to help with patients' care and access to novel drugs and digital technologies. Under the agreement with Roche, the two organisations will jointly explore advanced AI and digital technologies to accelerate clinical trial recruitment, improve market access, and enhance business intelligence. Enigma Health's sovereign AI workflow solution will be integrated into Roche's business processes to support their commitment to improving patient outcomes through innovation.

The partnership with Enterprise Digital focuses on working together to explore new business and market opportunities. Enigma Health’s small language model will be added to ST Engineering’s AGIL Genie Studio platform, making it easier for non-technical users to create AI-powered healthcare apps. The partnership also brings together SingHealth’s clinical expertise and ST Engineering’s hospital command centre data management, creating a strong synergy to improve healthcare operations, decision-making and AI clinical trials.

Enigma Health’s flagship product, Enigma, is Singapore’s home-grown sovereign healthcare agentic AI platform developed by a team of clinicians and AI scientists to improve workflow optimisation, streamlining data-intensive and time-consuming processes while ensuring robust data security and regulatory compliance. It has been piloted at SingHealth institutions. It reduced audit times by 90% at the Singapore National Eye Centre, and achieved a 400-fold improvement in PDF extraction speed at the KK Women's and Children's Hospital.

Looking ahead, Enigma Health will partner with Synapxe, the national healthtech agency, to scale up implementation of its flagship platform across SingHealth. 

Telecommunications fraud

A Singapore-Thailand alliance was also formed to strengthen ASEAN’s fight against telecom scams at the sidelines of ATxSG 2025. IMDA and Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to combat telecommunications fraud across ASEAN. The partnership will focus on:

• Sharing intelligence on scam trends and patterns

• Developing stronger preventive measures

• Analysing international call traffic to identify vulnerabilities

• Raising regional baseline security standards

The MoU was exchanged between Jasmin Lau, Singapore Minister of State at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information and Dr Sarana Boonbaichaiyapruck, Chairman of the NBTC.

Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG) is Asia’s leading technology event jointly organised by IMDA and Informa. The event comprises three main segments, ATxSummit, ATxEnterprise and ATxInspire.