Beating Google and Apple, Huawei brings large AI model to mobile voice assistant

At HDC 2023, Huawei launched HarmonyOS 4 operating system with a large Pangu AI model for Celia voice assistant, winning against – Apple and Google. Both of these companies are working on LLM features for their voice assistant but there’s no official confirmation.

Huawei Celia voice assistant in smart devices gets its power from LLM Pangu 3.0 AI. This will enable more features for the users than what they currently have. The interactions, you can now interact with the voice assistant in various ways including text, images, documents, and more.

The new version of Celia can understand many new commands with natural language processing capabilities. It can help the users to write long summaries and could be used as a copywriting tool.

Celia now has better control over the device with better features to understand and execute user prompts. For example, it can find you a picture from the gallery app with a voice description such as “Help me find the photos at the beach last autumn”. You can further navigate from there to find relevant searches with related prompts.

The large language model on the Huawei voice assistant is capable of searching for any document inside your phone. All you need to do is briefly describe the document and it will pop up on your screen. A command such as “Help me find the PPT about event planning last week” is a good example.

Celia could also change your phone’s wallpaper, for example, “Celia, change my wallpaper to rain season” and then the phone will swap your theme to the panoramic rain theme. Another thing to note is that the voice assistant can create emails and send them. Celia can also create suggestions for you.

The assistant can also read out an image and give you important information first. These are just a few examples of the new AI-powered capabilities of the Huawei voice assistant.

Huawei said all of the training data of this new Celia Voice Assistant will be kept inside the user’s device to maintain privacy. The new Celia will be available starting this month for closed testing.