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15/11/2018

Huawei To Rival Google And Amazon In The Voice Assistant Segment Outside Of China




Huawei To Rival Google And Amazon In The Voice Assistant Segment Outside Of China
Chinese tech company Huawei potentially wants to rival the likes of Google and Amazon in the sphere of virtual assistants as the company is working on the development of its own voice assistant which would work outside of China.
 
Huawei already has a voice assistant that it has developed and sells only in the Chinese market which is called Xiaoyi and which uses a smart speaker called the AI Cube and the smartphones manufactured by the company itself. But that device is only for the Chinese market. 
 
Now with the aim of making a mark in the global market, Huawei is attempting to develop a voice assistant that would have the ability to satisfy customer demands outside of China. 
 
"We are using our own in China, in (the) future we will also have our own outside of China," Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, said in a television interview.
 
"In the beginning, we are mainly using Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa" for its AI Cube and smartphones, he said. "We need more time to build our AI (artificial intelligence) services ... Later we will expand this outside of China."
 
However they Chinese tech company would continue to partner both Amazon and Google on its multiple running projects and for the android operating systems on its smartphone4s, reiterated the CEO. He stated that the company would continue to use Google and Amazon’s offerings and software for its products meant for outside of China till such time that the company manages to develop its own voice assistant suitably for prime time. But it is also very obvious that any expansion that the company is planning outside of China with respect to its voice assistant would pit it against and in direct competition with both the partnering companies because both the U.S. tech giants also have their own voice activated assistants which are also integrated with multiple hardware.
 
No comments from Google and Amazon were available on the plans of Huawei.
 
Nothing was however revealed by Yu about the language or languages that Huawei’s new voice assistant planned for sale outside of China would be supported as well as about the possible timeframe of its availability,
 
Voice assistance is one of the key technologies that tech companies are striving to better develop which would enable consumers to interact with other devices – especially those gadgets that are “smart” and are connected to the internet. Many experts view the voice assistants that are currently available in the market such as Amazon’s Echo and Huawei's AI Cube as a control centre for the home from where users can control all of the connected devices and appliances which can be voice controlled.
 
But the two possible competitors for Huawei in the voice assistant domain are already well established.  While the so called internet of things driven by the Android operating system is dominated by the data-driven assistant Google,  the new smart speaker segment is now being taken over by Amazon’s Alexa.
 
(Source:www.gizmochina.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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