Alberto Abad, a professor at DEI, is responsible, through INESC-ID, for coordinating multimodal language processing, specifically in integrating spoken language into AMALIA (Assistente Multimodal Automático com Inteligência Artificial). This will enable AMALIA not only to interpret text but also to receive and process speech and images, giving it "ears" and "eyes," while the "brain" generates accurate and contextualized textual responses.

AMALIA will be the first Large Language Model (LLM) in Portuguese, designed from the ground up to reflect and preserve the richness of Portuguese language and identity. It is being developed to understand, process, and generate content in European Portuguese, capturing nuances in both language and culture.

Supported under Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) and coordinated by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the AMALIA project is being developed by a national consortium composed of leading academic and research institutions. This consortium includes the University of Lisbon, through Instituto Superior Técnico, NOVA University, the University of Porto, the University of Coimbra, the University of Minho, and national laboratories NOVA LINCS, IT, INESC TEC, CISUC/LASI, and ALGORITMI/LASI. Experts from the University of Beira Interior and the University of Évora are also contributing.

(image: INESC-ID)