Huawei is developing its own voice assistant for smartphones which will be designed to compete with the leading brands. As of now, the leading brands are Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The new voice assistant will be called the HiAssistant.
The Huawei handsets located in China already contain the application, HiVoice, which allows users to call someone through voice command. However, the new virtual assistant will be an improved version since it will feature Natural Language Understanding or NLU. This will allow the device to interpret unstructured sentences through human input enabling efficient communication between people without having to worry about mispronunciations and peculiar speech.
The new virtual assistant will also be able to do other features. Among these is the ability to change any setting in the device through voice alone. This includes all basic hardware functions (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) as well as all software functions (volume levels, location settings, etc.) Another feature is a search option for food, emoticons, navigation routes, train tickets, and videos. Searching won’t be limited for the virtual assistant can look through specific categories such as music albums, TV shows, books and more. Sending payments to major banks in China through HiAssistant is also possible.
Huawei will also be featuring the HiVision which is kind of similar to the Google lens. It will be able to recognize categories of objects such as food, passports, people, accessories, animals, appliances, tools, toys, vehicles, etc. The HiAI Mobile Computing platform will allow third-party apps to use its scene recognition to recognize the beach, bicycles, cars, cats, dogs, fireworks, flowers, and more. Finally, HiVision can also read barcodes, text, and more.
According to the reports, HiAssistant will only be available exclusively in China and devices powered by Kirin 970 chipset and EMUI 8.1. There are still no announcements or reports if HiAssistant will be released internationally.
