Reports have it that one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, Huawei, is expanding its business and venturing into the field of smart assistants to produce a Siri counterpart for their future device releases.
REUTERS/Rick WilkingHuawei CEO Consumer Business Group, Richard Yu, presents Huawei Mate 9 to the U.S. market at CES in Las Vegas, January 5, 2017.
Bloomberg broke the news that back in China, Huawei’s homeland, the company has enlisted the expertise of more than a hundred engineers to work on a smart assistant. According to the report, the project is in its early stages and is being carried out at Hauwei’s offices in Shenzhen.
Huawei’s project to build their own voice-powered digital assistant is described by Bloomberg as “extensive,” since it aims to compete with other existing smart assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Alphabet’s Google Assistant.
However, it also seems like Huawei is taking the project slowly and might have an initial launch in China. According to Bloomberg’s sources, the company is aiming to produce a smart assistant that will communicate in the Chinese language. This means they are targeting the China market for the meantime.
While Huawei’s project is in its early phase, the unnamed sources claim that the company is not severing its ties with Google and Amazon right away and wants to keep on working with them in terms of putting voice-powered smart assistants to Huawei-branded mobile devices that are being shipped around the world.
The same report notes that Huawei has become the third largest smartphone maker in the world recently. Last September, in a report from the Wall Street Journal, the company manifested its goal to become the second smartphone giant by 2018, taking it one step at a time. It looks like developing their own voice-powered smart assistant brings them a step closer to that goal.
In the same WSJ report, Huawei had 8.9 percent of the market share, Apple is seated in the second place with 12.9 percent, and Samsung was at the top spot with a good lead of 22.3 percent share. However, following the Galaxy Note 7 debacle shortly after the report, Apple dominated the league, according to Strategy Analytics.
On the other hand, Samsung is trying to regain their former spot and is also developing their own smart assistant. In fact, they have acquired VIV Labs, the company that originally created Apple’s Siri, last year to achieve their plan of developing their very own voice-powered digital assistant dubbed as Bixby.
