Huawei Celia Voice Assistant Can Now Understand Natural Language, Generate Text, and Control Devices

With HarmonyOS 4, Huawei has also announced a new version of its Celia voice assistant at Huawei’s Developer’s Conference 2023, that is powered by the large language model (LLM) Pangu 3.0 AI. We touched on this briefly in our HarmonyOS 4 release article, but there was a lot more to uncover.

This new version of Celia is technically more versatile than the previous version, with the ability to understand natural language, generate text, and control devices, much like the more popular language models (like ChatGPT), but in an assistant form.

The main highlight of the new Celia is it’s ability to understand, and interact in a more natural language. This means that users can now give Celia commands in a more natural way, such as “Find me photos of the beach last autumn” or “Change my wallpaper to the rain season.” (via HC).

While this may not seem like a big deal if you’re used to the Google Assistant, they are still major changes, as far as Celia is concerned. Celia can also generate text, which means that it can be used to write emails, create presentations, and even write creative content.

Since, in the future, these virtual assistants will be deeper integrated into our lives, it’s no shame to admit that AI will play a huge role in that, and taking proactive next steps will help when judging specific situations. Huawei has done just that, and has perfectly capitalized on that hype.

I say ‘hype‘ because they specifically used the word AI, much like Google did. In reality however, each virtual assistant uses machine learning and information provided to make decisions, but still this step by Huawei is a step taken in the right direction.

In addition to its natural language processing and text generation capabilities, Celia can also control devices. I’m not sure why Huawei hadn’t implemented this in earlier builds, as it’s such a vital addition to the virtual assistant experience, but since Celia was only released in 2020, it’s fair to say that Huawei needed some time.

Now, you can tell Celia to turn on the lights, change the thermostat, or play music. Celia can also be used to set reminders, send messages, and make appointments, which are essentially the normal assistant tasks.

Huawei says that all of the training data for the new Celia voice assistant will be kept on the user’s device, which helps to protect user privacy. The new Celia is now available for closed testing, and it is expected to be released to the public later this year.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.