Huawei launched its latest flagship devices, the Mate 40 series yesterday, and amidst the launch announced that Huawei’s digital voice assistant Celia will initially launch in 15 countries.
During the presentation, Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu noted that Celia would support five languages at launch – English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Due to the fact that the U.S. placed the company on a trade blacklist, Huawei has been working really hard to develop alternatives to Google apps and services. One of the main features lost is Google Assistant, so Huawei created its own voice assistant by the name of “Celia”.
Celia is the global version of their own personal assistant in China (called Xiaoyi) and is currently available on the Huawei P40 series of smartphones in the UK, France, Spain, Chile, Mexico and Colombia , Celia currently has the ability to recognize commands in English, French, and Spanish.
Similar to other virtual assistants, Celia has a wake word — “Hey Celia” — though users can elect to press and hold the power button for one second to activate it instead. After that, users can ask Celia to make a phone call, send a text, set an alarm, turn off Bluetooth, set up a calendar appointment, and more.
Huawei is also launching a feature called “face to face translate,” which uses Celia as a virtual translator between two individuals in the same room. Here, each user will see the words spoken by the other person on their phone’s screen in real time
Elsewhere, Celia will also work with Huawei’s existing AI Lens feature, which means the user can hover their phone’s camera over a piece of food and say, “Hey Celia, how many calories are in this?” or ask Celia what type of flower is in front of them.
The information will be displayed on the user’s phone screen as before, except they can now activate the feature with their voice.
Given that Celia formed part of the EMUI 11 portion of the presentation, it may arrive when the latest version of Huawei’s operating system rolls out to devices.
