A Cross-Border Bet on Philippine Dialects
In March 2026, a trilateral agreement was signed between Philippine telecommunications provider InfiniVAN, Japan-linked IT firm IPS Inc., and India’s Gnani.ai. The goal: introduce advanced voice-based artificial intelligence systems capable of operating in multiple Philippine dialects.
Koji Miyashita, CEO of InfiniVAN and president of parent company IPS Inc., framed the collaboration as a strategic convergence of expertise. India, he noted, has emerged as a global leader in linguistic AI. The partnership is designed to continuously evolve as new dialects and languages are integrated into the platform.
LikásGPT: The Local Engine Behind the Partnership
The technical centerpiece of the collaboration is LikásGPT, a large language model-based customer relationship management system developed by InfiniVAN and UP Diliman. Built to understand the Filipino voice, LikásGPT allows companies to engage with customers accurately and naturally regardless of dialect or channel. It supports 12 local languages and aims to cover over 90% of the Philippine population.
This is not a generic multilingual chatbot retrofitted for Filipino. LikásGPT was designed from the ground up for the linguistic realities of the archipelago—where a single customer conversation can shift between Tagalog, English, and a regional language within three sentences.
The BPO Angle: 1.5 Million Workers and a Massive Addressable Market
The Philippine BPO sector employs approximately 1.5 million workers, and AI tools that improve agent performance—quality assurance, real-time assist, document extraction—have an enormous addressable market with sophisticated local buyers. Voice AI that can handle dialectal variation is not a luxury feature for this sector. It is a core operational requirement.
The InfiniVAN-IPS-Gnani.ai partnership positions itself squarely in that gap. By combining Gnani.ai‘s voice AI expertise with InfiniVAN’s local telecommunications infrastructure and UP Diliman’s linguistic research, the consortium is building a stack that no single player could assemble alone.
The Government Push: KWF’s 30-Million-Word Corpus
The private-sector push is mirrored by government action. The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) has partnered with the Department of Science and Technology for the “Pinoy AI” project, contributing 30 million words to strengthen the national language’s digital presence. KWF Chair Atty. Marites E. Barrios-Taran framed the move as a “brave and positive response”—not fearing AI, but using it to keep the national language and over 135 indigenous languages alive in the digital age.
For the trilateral partnership, this government corpus represents a potential training resource. For Philippine enterprises, it signals that multilingual voice AI is moving from research labs to procurement budgets.
