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Telefonica (TEF), RAE Tie Up to Promote Spanish on AI Capabilities

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In a concerted effort to augment its footprint in artificial intelligence (AI), Telefonica, S.A. (TEF - Free Report) extended its collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy (“RAE”) to overcome linguistic challenges and reinforce Spanish language skills among its customers. Markedly, the partnership is part of the LEIA (Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence) project. Telefonica is primarily known for its focused endeavors to accelerate Spain’s digital transformation with an agile, robust and secure telecommunications infrastructure.

The telco aims to emphasize the importance of developing automation systems and create advanced tools that foster the proper usage of Spanish language in machines while capitalizing on the best-in-class capabilities of AI. Despite such positive developments, shares of Telefonica inched up negligibly to close at $4.07 as on Dec 29.

In fact, LEIA was launched in 2019 by RAE in collaboration with some of the giant tech companies like Microsoft Corporation (MSFT - Free Report) , Alphabet Inc. (GOOG - Free Report) , Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN - Free Report) and Facebook. Notably, Telefonica stands out among these companies as it has been the prime supporter of LEIA to promote Spanish language in the field of next-gen technologies. As part of the LEIA framework, Telefonica and RAE are engaged in two projects.

The first project involves a more interactive experience wherein users of Movistar Home are presented a variety of questions on Spanish language. Interestingly, Movistar Home is an intelligent device that reinvents the overall communication in the home premises on the back of Telefonica’s virtual assistant — Aura. Consequently, this acumen test helps users to improve Spanish speaking skills while getting a good grip on the language.

The second project aims to accelerate research activities related to the Spanish language and propel technological advancements in the academic field by leveraging AI capabilities. The project has been particularly designed for lexicologists, computational linguists and philologists. Markedly, Telefonica utilizes RAE’s linguistic resources such as grammar and dictionaries to develop its networking tools while following the criteria for appropriate Spanish language usage. With such out-of-the-box initiative, the extended collaboration is likely to underscore Telefonica’s analytics and AI competences while promoting the importance of Spanish in global markets.

Discussing about technology, the Spain-based telco’s subsidiary, Telefonica Tech, extended its collaboration with Geprom Connecting Industries few days back in an effort to boost digital transformation of the industrial sector. Per the collaboration, the two companies will primarily focus on capitalizing best-in-class technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and AI to enhance productivity and reduce operational overheads while facilitating real-time decision making with seamless logistics. The joint leadership strategy focuses on developing new business models and is likely to equip clients with wide-ranging industry oriented automated services while extending its commercialization to the international arena.

Telefonica provides a comprehensive suite of service platforms for fast go-to-market launches. Its IoT connectivity platform has been designed to address dynamic business requirements and enable a cost-effective solution to improve business productivity. Over the past years, it has invested heavily in the deployment and transformation of its network to provide seamless connectivity with enhanced capacity, speed, coverage and security. With operations across 17 countries, the Spanish telecom company is capitalizing on the opportunities in the digital world through several growth strategies to enhance long-term prospects, while experiencing healthy traction in the smartphone market.

Telefonica currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Shares of the company have returned 17.9% compared with the industry’s growth of 13.9% in the past three months. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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