The launch of the Huawei P40 brought us three new phones, some more hardware-level surprises, the same story about Google services and Celia’s presentation. Yes, that is the name of the new voice assistant with which Huawei wants to continue to grow its own ecosystem.
Why Huawei launches its own assistant
Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, those are the three assistants that all come to mind when we talk about interacting through voice commands, be it with a phone, speaker or even a television. All other proposals are as if they did not exist.
And do not think that they were few, many companies have tried to stick their heads to position themselves as the fourth great assistant, but nobody has succeeded. Not even Samsung with all its marketing machinery has succeeded with Bixby , and look they have tried it actively and passively. But the experience with said assistant was never remarkable.
What’s more, by living with Google, given the choice, users ended up turning to Assistant for understanding, reliability in responses and even integration with other devices.
For this reason, Huawei launched its own assistant was striking and surprising, although their situation differs from that of Samsung. Due to the famous veto of the Trump administration, the company stopped having access to Google services and that also implied not being able to use its assistant.
So, immersed in their quest to create an ecosystem of products and their own software in the purest Apple style, without depending or not on future decisions of a government and a company like Google, that they launch their own voice assistant is something that in this case makes a lot of sense. Especially when you think beyond the smartphone.
Hey Celia, what can you do?
Leaving aside the company’s motivations for creating and pushing its own voice assistant, what can Celia do for the user? Because that is really the key question. If, as happened with Bixby, it is not useful, then your future will be the same: oblivion.
Right now, what we know is that Celia allows us to answer common day-to-day questions and display useful information for the user. For example, to-dos, calendar appointments, etc. Those data will also be able to be entered using voice commands. You invoke with the classic “hey, Celia” and then you give the order that interests you. For example, add an appointment in my calendar, call X contact, etc.
Although the long-term plans may be more ambitious, for now it seems that Celia is focused more on being a useful assistant for the user’s daily life and not on being the smartest on the market. And in the absence of trying it more calmly, the truth is that the idea seems right. In addition, to avoid complications, they have already commented that Celia complies with the European GDPR laws , so all the information regarding the voice profile is stored on the device, never on its servers.
In short, seeing how the company is pushing the development of apps for the App Gallery and other improvements that take advantage of highly capable hardware, as we have already seen in the latest proposals from the Mate and P families, it seems that they are serious about it.
Source> Huawei