T-Mobile US readies AI Live Translation trial

T-Mobile US chief network officer Ankur Kapoor ( pictured ) gave Mobile World Live more insight into a network-based real-time translation service it is poised to begin beta testing in the coming weeks, which uses its standalone (SA) 5G network core and an agentic AI platform. Kapoor said Live Translation would enable conversions during phone conversations where one of the users is a T-Mobile customer regardless of if the other caller is on its network. The service was announced on 11 February during the operator’s capital markets day, and is hardware and software agnostic. While some devices can provide live translations during calls, T-Mobile’s service runs natively on its SA 5G core and agentic AI platform to enable translations anywhere in the world. “It’s native built on the core network, so it’s not a bolt-on,” Kapoor said. T-Mobile got a jump on rivals AT&T and Verizon by launching its SA 5G network in 2020. Kapoor said penetration is currently about 80 per cent. Global potential The executive said T-Mobile handles more than 6 billion international calls each year and 40 per cent of its customer base travels internationally. “It doesn’t have to be in the US, because of these roaming agreements that we have,” Kapoor explained. “All of the traffic comes back to the US for authentication. Once we know that, we can activate Live Translation.” The service works over Wi‑Fi and all mobile technologies except 2G. It even functions on older flip phones. Kapoor said T-Mobile had more people sign up for Live Translation on the first day than it did when it launched a beta of its T-Satellite service . He explained T-Mobile initially used two large language models (LLMs) for Live Translation but recently added a third. “Our vision is to make it model agnostic as well, just like we’ve made it device agnostic.” “We also believe the future of this is not an LLM, but a small language model. Something that could be built on the phone, or something that could stay on a cloud network.” The post T-Mobile US readies AI Live Translation trial appeared first on Mobile World Live .