Huawei, the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, is reportedly working on its own digital voice-activated assistant. The company’s AI assistant will soon be competing with Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
Huawei has formed a team with over 100 engineers in Shenzhen, China which is currently in early stages of development for the new digital smart assistant, according to one of Bloomberg. Huawei’s digital assistant will be aimed at Chinese customers meaning it will communicate in Chinese languages.
One of Bloomberg’s sources claimed that Huawei will continue to work with Google and Amazon when it comes to providing other services to its phones internationally. The company’s own assistant will mostly rival Apple’s Siri on iPhones as most of Google’s services in China are blocked off despite majority smartphone users are using Android OS.
Although Huawei intends to continue working with Google, the company’s endeavor to build its own AI assistant clashes with Google’s plan in convincing other manufacturers to pre-install its own assistant on their devices. Currently, Google Assistant is only available on the Pixel phones, Google Home and Android Wear 2.0 smartwatches.
As for Huawei’s commitment with Amazon, the Chinese phone maker previously just released its Mate 9 smartphone in the U.S. last month and it comes with Alexa already pre-installed. The Huawei Mate 9 first launch in China and other Asian markets back in November 2016.
Huawei new digital assistant for its smartphones in China will be the company’s second investment in artificial intelligence. Back in October, the company announced that it plans to fund UC Berkeley in a partnership to research deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision, according to TechCrunch.
Huawei has proven to be quite ambitious with its future plans. One of he company’s top executives, Richard Yu, stated last month during CES 2017 that Huawei wants to be the number one smartphone manufacturer by 2021.
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