Honor looks to get ahead of Apple in China with its own AI assistant

Honor announced its first artificial intelligence assistant on Friday, as it looks to jump ahead of companies like Apple and introduce software it hopes will spur users to buy its latest devices.

Honor's digital assistant Yoyo has got an AI upgrade and will be coming to users in China in the near future, with international markets to follow, the company said. Yoyo is not new — but the AI infusion is. honor is calling it the Honor AI Agent.

In one demonstration seen by CNBC ahead of the announcement, Honor showed how a user could ask Yoyo to find automatic subscriptions across WeChat and Alipay, the two most popular payment apps in China. During the exercise, Yoyo found the subscriptions, then asked the user whether to cancel them.

So-called AI agents have been touted by smartphone makers as way to make the experiences on phone devices more personal and efficient. The idea is that these agents could learn a user's behavior and make suggestions based on that.

While digital assistants like Apple's Siri or Samsung's Bixby have been around for a while, their abilities have been limited. Companies are now looking at ways to infuse such virtual helpers with AI, following the emergence of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs), which are trained on huge amounts of data and underpin conversational chatbots.

Honor's competitors are taking similar steps. TM Roh, the head of Samsung's mobile division, told CNBC that the company will be unveiling a further upgraded Bixby this year that uses the South Korean technology giant's own LLM. Apple is also gearing up to roll out Apple Intelligence which has an improved Siri, though it is unlikely to come to China this year.

With Yoyo, Honor is looking to get ahead of these major players as well as other domestic rivals.