As the global rivalry heats up, Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor, a spin-off of Huawei Technologies, is depending on artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the way people use its devices and give it an advantage.
At a launch event in Barcelona on Sunday, Honor CEO George Zhao Ming outlined the company’s new AI strategy, which entails developing a “intent-based user interface” that would aid in enabling a seamless experience across various systems and devices. He was giving a speech prior to MWC Barcelona, formerly known as the Mobile World Congress, a trade exhibition for the mobile communications sector.
Zhao showed off Honor’s new Magic Portal feature during an interface showcase. This enables users to quickly open the location in Google Maps by tapping and dragging a text message that contains the name of a restaurant, for example. The concept is that AI can foresee user needs to provide a better experience.
The Magic 6 Pro, Honor’s most recent flagship smartphone, made its world debut at the event. It has AI-powered features including Magic Portal and MagicLM, the company’s 7-billion-parameter large language model (LLM). In Europe, prices begin at €1,299 (US$1,405).
Zhao stated at the event that Honor is interested in collaborating with business partners to advance its AI capabilities. He cited Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, as an example, noting that Honor employs the open-source Llama 2 model from the US tech giant to create text and respond to user inquiries on the Magic 6 Pro.
As part of the larger Magic 6 series, the new flagship smartphone made its debut in mainland China last month. It was Honor’s first 5G phone to come equipped with MagicLM.
As competition in the area heats up, Honor is not the only company attempting to include AI capabilities into its phones. As AI is viewed as a key factor in the anticipated market recovery this year following a protracted decline, numerous smartphone manufacturers have made their commitment to implementing it on their own products known.
Oppo, which according to research firm IDC will rank as the fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world in 2023, declared earlier this month that the “AI phone era” had begun and that it will be allocating more resources in this direction. The company’s own AndesGPT AI is included in the Find X7 series smartphones, which were released last month.
For its well-known Galaxy devices, Samsung Electronics uses third parties to provide generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). As part of a multi-year cooperation, the company’s 5G devices will employ Google’s Gemini model globally. But as Samsung revealed this month, the South Korean tech behemoth has teamed up with Baidu to use its LLM in the Galaxy S24 in mainland China.
Global shipments of GenAI-enabled smartphones are expected to surpass 100 million units this year, up from roughly 47 million in 2023, and then quickly increase to 552 million by 2027, according to tech research firm Counterpoint.
According to Counterpoint, GenAI handsets, a subclass of AI smartphones, employ similar models to produce original content as opposed to only responding preprogrammed or carrying out predetermined tasks. Since AI models are frequently built into chipsets and come with specified hardware requirements, these devices execute AI models natively.
According to IDC, worldwide smartphone shipments decreased 3.2% year over year to 1.17 billion devices in 2023. The research group stated that although the number of shipments for the entire year was the lowest in ten years, “growth in the second half of the year has cemented the expected recovery for 2024.”