Huawei does have a voice assistant similar to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant called Xiaoyi. It’s only available for the company’s smartphone owners in its home country of China. The company is now interested in offering a voice assistant to users outside China that can compete with others in the virtual assistant space. It’s working on such an assistant, according to CEO Richard Yu.
It would make sense for Huawei to offer a smart assistant to users outside China as well. It aims to be the top smartphone vendor globally in a couple of years and voice assistants are now common even on mid-range devices.
Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer business CEO, told CNBC in an interview that Huawei is using its own voice assistant in China and that in the future, “we will also have our own outside of China.” It does, however, require time to build the artificial intelligence services before rolling them out.
This won’t mean that Huawei will give up on its partnerships with Amazon and Google. It’s pertinent to mention here that if Huawei does offer a voice assistant globally, that offering would be in direct competition with Alexa and Google Assistant respectively.
Yu didn’t provide a lot of details about this assistant that Huawei is building as yet. He didn’t say which languages it would support outside China and when we can expect it to arrive.
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