Huawei presents its own digital assistant for European market
Huawei has announced its own digital assistant for the European market under the name Celia. The assistant speaks English, French and Spanish and is standard on the P40 smartphones that the manufacturer will release next month.
Among other things, Celia can perform voice commands for things like operating system functions or performing searches, the announcement shows. In addition, there is a possibility to start a translation function, where interlocutors can speak in different languages and the software translates the speech.
New Huawei smartphones no longer have the Google Assistant on board, the digital assistant of the search giant. Huawei’s P40 phones cannot use Google services due to the US government’s still-in effect trade ban. Cortana from Microsoft and Alexa from Amazon could probably run on the phones.
Celia redirects users to the Huawei browser that is standard on the phone for searches. Huawei plans to support more languages in the future, but when that will happen is not yet clear. Huawei announced Celia at the presentation of the P40 smartphones on Thursday. Celia is the international version of Huawei’s Chinese-speaking assistant Xiaoyi. It has been known for a year and a half that the manufacturer wanted to release Xiaoyi internationally.