Grab pilots AI phone service for ride bookings

Service completed 1,000 pilot calls before rolling out phone ride bookings.

Grab Singapore has launched the beta version of Grab AI Call-A-Ride, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered phone service that enables users to book rides through natural conversations with an AI voice assistant.

Developed in collaboration with OpenAI and powered by its Realtime Voice model, the pilot service is designed to make ride booking more accessible for seniors and others who find mobile app navigation difficult or inconvenient.

Currently available in English and Chinese, with plans to expand to more regional languages, the AI assistant can interpret user intent, maintain context, adapt mid-conversation, and process ride bookings without relying on traditional automated phone menus.

“By combining OpenAI’s Realtime Voice model with Grab’s deep understanding of its users, our teams are helping make ride booking more natural and accessible for seniors and visually impaired users,” said Albert Yip, head of Technical Success, Asia Pacific at OpenAI.

The pilot builds on Grab’s Voice Assistant for the Visually Impaired, launched in 2025 to enable voice navigation of the Grab app for low-vision users.

Grab said it incorporated more than 100,000 locally donated voice samples to improve recognition of regional accents and mixed-language speech.

Before the launch, the service processed approximately 1,000 pilot calls involving users from different demographic groups.

The company also said developing the service led to several engineering advances, including a voiceprint solution that enables the AI to better distinguish a caller’s voice from background noise over repeated interactions, improving recognition accuracy in noisy environments.

“By integrating Grab's proprietary speech technologies and hyper-local data with foundational voice models, we are trying to bring back the intuitive simplicity of a voice call, backed by the flexible reasoning and scalability of conversational AI—taking another step towards safe, reliable mobility for everyone,” said Philipp Kandal, chief product officer at Grab.

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