With every passing tech launch it feels like generative AI is invading more and more devices, especially as companies position their AI features front and center as the primary reason we should consider buying their products. There's no better example of this than the AI Phone (the clue's in the name, really), a smartphone designed by carrier Deutsche Telekom (DT) together with OpenAI competitor Perplexity and announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.
I got a first-hand look at an early version of the AI phone in DT's hot pink booth at MWC and was shown a demo of how Perplexity has been integrated into the device. The one thing that struck me immediately was the extent to which DT has chosen to push AI into the foreground. It's something that I expect we'll only see more of in the coming year, most likely in partnerships between specialist AI companies and phone makers.
The AI assistant is activated by either the pink button on the side of the phone or by a dedicated icon on the lock screen that sits where a home button would have lived once upon a time. The default input is to give Perplexity a task or ask it a question as a voice command, but you can also switch to typing if that's your preference.
I saw a demo of what has become the de facto example of how an AI assistant works: the restaurant booking. Perplexity will suggest restaurants for you and then help you with booking the right one by taking you right to OpenTable. "You can see at the top the sources, which is one of the reasons we like Perplexity a lot," Deutsche Telekom product manager Benedetta Basile tells me.
By baking Perplexity into the AI Phone, we're seeing what it likely DT's first step towards an even more AI-centered interface. Last year at MWC, also at the DT booth, I saw a concept phone designed as a partnership between the carrier and a Silicon Valley-based company called Brain.AI. The phone generated an interface using AI in real time dependent on the task at hand in a bid to move away from using apps completely, but being a concept was perhaps a little ahead of its time.
DT's 2025 AI phone differs from this in that it's basically still a standard Android phone with apps downloaded from the Google Play Store, but AI has been given center stage. The idea is to reduce our reliance on app switching, without doing away with them completely.
The Perplexity Assistant can also help you with a slew of other productivity-centered tasks from creating calendar entries, to writing emails, to translation. But Perplexity is also just one part of DT's wider artificial intelligence offering, which sits under the banner of Magenta AI.
This suite of AI tools will not just be available on the AI phone, but via the DT app – it just won't be as central to the phone's interface. From this summer, Magenta AI will also include tools and features from Google Cloud AI, ElevenLabs and Picsart.
As for the phone, which is the latest in DT's ongoing own-brand T Phone series, it will be available to customers in European markets where the network operates in the second half of this year, with pricing still to be announced. The likelihood is that it will be a more affordable alternative to many of the flagship models that offer a similarly AI-centric experience, but at a higher price.
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