In this paper, we introduce a new European project named OrienTel. The aim of OrienTel is to enable the project's participants to design and develop multilingual interactive communication services for the Mediterranean and the Middle East, ranging from Morocco in the West to the Gulf states in the East, including Turkey and Cyprus. These multilingual applications will be largely speech-based and will typically be implemented on mobile and multi-modal platforms such as cellular GSM or UMTS phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) or combinations of the two. Applications of the kind targeted are unified messaging, information retrieval, customer care, banking, WAP and service portals. To achieve this aim, the consortium will produce various surveys of the OrienTel region, compile a set of 22 linguistic databases, conduct research into ASR-related problems the OrienTel languages hold and develop demonstrator applications bearing evidence of OrienTel's multilingual orientation.