Given there's no Google Assistant on Huawei's latest devices, including the P40 series, the company has revealed its very own voice assistant called Celia. She/it/they will understand commands in English, French and Spanish and will behave an awful lot like Siri did at launch, namely some pretty basic voice interactions with core phone features. Think: weather updates, texts and phone call requests. It'll also set reminders, interact with your calendar and even translate. Huawei is hoping its attempts go better than Samsung's own Bixby voice assistant.
Huawei made its own Siri rival called Celia
Don't mention the 'B' word.
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Huawei first mentioned Celia last year, pitched as the global version of its Chinese-speaking voice assistant called Xiaoyi. Like its predecessor, Celia will also be able to use Huawei devices' AI lens to detect objects and presumably access more information on said objects. When I tried to summon Celia on a P40 Pro sample, Apple's Siri on my HomePod speaker thought I was talking to it -- that's... not great. (And I'm not the only one.)
The translation features worked as advertised though, and I'll be playing with it more as I put Huawei's newest phones through their paces. Celia will appear on Huawei devices through a later OTA update, when EMUI 10.1 officially lands alongside the P40 phone series on April 7th.
