Chinese smartphone company Honor unveiled new AI features on Wednesday. Pictured is CEO George Chao speaking in Shanghai on June 26, 2024.
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Honor, a spinoff from Huawei that focuses on high-end devices, revealed on Wednesday that the latest version of its Android-based Magic operating system focuses on AI as an assistant.
The company’s demo showed how even vague voice commands like “I’m tired, order me something” can cause a phone to automatically order coffee without the user ever touching the device. We used AI to mimic actions on a touchscreen. Human intervention was only required to complete the payment.
The AI assistant can also identify and send documents to contacts or make calls via social media app WeChat without the user touching the phone.
For Chinese devices, Honor works with: Baidu We collaborate with other Chinese companies on some AI capabilities and develop others on our own. Honor will work with Google on devices sold overseas.
The new AI features are expected to be released in Honor’s upcoming smartphone Magic 7, which is scheduled to launch on October 30th. Honor plans to roll out AI capabilities to all its devices by the first few months of next year.
Magic 7 uses Qualcommannounced the newly announced Snapdragon Elite 8 chip for mobile phones. Honor teased new AI features on Monday at the chipmaker’s annual event.
Chinese home appliance and smartphone company Xiaomi will also launch new phones this month featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite 8 chip. Xiaomi hasn’t been very vocal about AI features for its smartphones.
Toby Zhu, a senior analyst at Canalys, said in a phone interview Wednesday after the Honor event that AI capabilities have risen to a new level. He said the new features have great potential to encourage consumers to switch to another device.
“Apple faces challenges in China, but according to our data it will not face a significant decline,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
Apple’s sales in China decline
Honor, Xiaomi, and Huawei have all launched foldable products, a category that Apple hasn’t yet entered.
About 17% of Apple’s revenue in the quarter ended June 29 came from Greater China, down from 19% in the same period a year earlier. Apple is scheduled to announce its quarterly results on October 31st local time.
Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong on Wednesday to discuss data security and cloud services, the ministry said. Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Since its launch on September 20, the value of Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro Max has fallen slightly on second-hand shopping platform Xianyu. The device sold for between 8,000 Chinese yuan ($1,122) and 10,000 yuan on Wednesday, up from 10,500 to 16,300 yuan last month.
On the same day, Huawei released the tri-fold Mate XT. As of Wednesday, the device’s used price had fallen to the mid-20,000 yuan range, almost half the selling price on September 20th.
—CNBC’s Dylan Butts and Sonia Heng contributed to this report.
