Honor, a subsidiary of Huawei, occupied one of the most prominent booths at the Mobile World Congress in February 2023.
Arjun Kapoor CNBC
Honor announced its first artificial intelligence assistant on Friday as it looks to leapfrog the likes of Apple with software it hopes will spur users to buy its latest devices.
Honor stated that the digital assistant Yoyo has undergone an AI upgrade and will be available to Chinese users in the near future, and the international market will follow suit. Yoyo is not new, but the infusion of artificial intelligence is. Honor calls it Honor AI Agent.
Ahead of the announcement, CNBC saw a demo in which Honor showed how users could ask Yoyo to find automatic subscriptions in WeChat and Alipay, two of China’s most popular payment apps. During the exercise, Yoyo found the subscription and asked the user if they wanted to cancel the subscription.
Smartphone makers have touted so-called artificial intelligence agents as being able to make experiences on mobile devices more personal and efficient. The idea is that these agents can learn user behavior and make recommendations based on it.
While digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Samsung’s Bixby have been around for a while, their capabilities are still limited. The company is now looking at ways to inject artificial intelligence into such virtual assistants with the emergence of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs), which are trained on vast amounts of data and underpin conversational chatbots.
Honor’s rivals are taking similar measures. TM Roh, head of Samsung’s mobile division, told CNBC that the company will launch a further upgraded version of Bixby this year that uses the South Korean tech giant’s own LLM. Apple is also preparing to launch Apple Intelligence, which features an improved Siri, although it is unlikely to enter China this year.
Honor hopes to stay ahead of these major manufacturers and other domestic competitors through Yoyo.
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