Honor's Magic 7 series, which launches in China on Oct. 30, wants to handle your morning coffee order, tailored exactly to your taste, right down to the type of milk you prefer.
The Chinese company released a demo video to the media on Tuesday showing a text-based interaction between a person and the device's AI assistant, Yoyo. The user requests the assistant to order him a pick-me-up beverage saying, "Please help me order a drink. I am feeling a little sleepy." The AI assistant then goes on to launch the Meituan app, a popular food deliver app in China, selecting the Raw Milk Latte drink at a local coffee shop and takeout before placing the order.
In the video, some of the drink's preferences, such as not adding sugar and making it iced, seem to have been preselected rather than inputted on the spot. Presumably, the assistant was repeating the person's most frequent order. Honor said the idea is for the phone to learn a person's habits over time, which will allow the Magic 7 to learn which app to use for takeout as well as whether a user prefers coconut milk with their coffee over dairy milk, for instance.Â
In recent years, smartphone-makers have been leaning on AI, particularly generative AI, to lure buyers. A recent Motorola AI concept details a similar feature to what Honor is describing, which would also order a coffee on command from the nearest shop. Every major phone-maker from Google to Samsung and more recently Apple has been promoting new AI features in a bid to drive sales. AI isn't necessarily a contributing factor, but phone sales have been climbing this year. According to research firm Canalys, global smartphone shipments grew by 12% in the second quarter of this year, reaching 288 million units, with Samsung taking the top spot followed closely by Apple.
Honor's Yoyo Assistant placing a coffee order.
Honor also mentioned other assistant-like capabilities that it expects to make its way to the Magic 7. Those include the AI assistant finding and canceling unwanted subscriptions across different apps with just a command, which it previewed with a second demo video.
In the video, a person asks the Yoyo assistant to check which apps have auto-renewal subscriptions activated. In a matter of seconds, the assistant pulls up a series of apps that are due for renewal and then asks the user whether to cancel all those subscriptions.
"OK, Yoyo has taken over your phone," the assistant said before going on to cancel a subscription.
Apart from that, Honor said that the AI agent can help across a broad range of tasks including booking an airplane ticket, notification management and calendar scheduling, among others. These features are set to launch on an upcoming operating system, MagicOS 9.0, before the end of the month. The Magic 7 will run on Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, the company revealed on Monday at a Qualcomm conference.
Honor unveils its Magic 7 flagship series at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summnit conference in Hawaii on Monday.
Honor's vision for its phone AI seems more action-oriented compared to its competitors -- much like the plan Motorola laid out earlier in October, wherein it shared its ambitions of turning their phones into a true assistant. Motorola's vision also included the ability to order coffee using your phone with a simple command, among other tasks.
Last year, Honor teased an AI-powered eye-tracking feature around this time that eventually made its way to the Magic 6 series. Honor gave the Magic 6 Pro, the higher-end predecessor, a global launch at the Mobile World Congress technology conference in February this year. Honor is expected to give the Magic 7 lineup an international launch as well, but currently hasn't confirmed those plans.