Now the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, Huawei is looking to reach the top through building its very own eco-system for its devices. The company, which has invested in creating its own chipset, is also now heading down the road to creating their very own personal assistant.
Reports state Huawei will be making a competitor to the Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa with their own offering and have already begun work on the platform by employing 100 people tasked with developing the assistant at their Shenzhen headquarters.
Huawei’s personal assistant would be more focused in communicating in Chinese rather than English in order to help the domestic users integrate the advantages of having a personal assistant compared to the rest of the world. Inside sources have told Bloomberg that they will still continue to work with Google Services and Amazon outside of China.
Huawei will have a good chance of penetrating its assistant idea to Chinese consumers as Google based services are currently blocked in the region. After Huawei announced that its Mate 9 will feature Amazon’s Alexa in-built, it seems that the company itself is slowly moving away from the Android ecosystem and wants to build its very own one.
Huawei will be joining Samsung in being the phone-makers who come out with their own assistants this year. It has been said that the Huawei Assistant will have its own ecosystem of apps, games and services that are also currently in development for the regional market by Huawei. After Samsung acquired Viv labs, the company is also looking to separate itself from the generic Android experience and building its own, showing that more and more smartphone makers want to now defect from the Android route and create their own versions of OSes. We are likely to see a lot more companies take this route in the future.
The Chief Executive of Huawei, Richard Yu, has spoken of the company’s goals, citing that they want to bring a more personal connection to the user-base in China where they already have their own footing. They don’t have any plans of doing the same in the US in the short term, however.
China has the largest market for smartphone users in the world. Considering Huawei will be the only company in that region to take on such a project, it won’t long before they make their way to other markets as well. 2017 will be a battle of Assistants and the move towards VR and AR for smartphone makers this year. We are excited to see how this all turns out!
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