The mobile world has been amped up about AI for a few years now, but even the smartest virtual assistants have so far had a one-track mind. Honor is looking to change that, with a little help from friends Google and Qualcomm, in an upcoming phone that’ll truly understand context.
The firm demoed an AI agent at Mobile World Congress that can cross-reference your diary and travel times before booking a restaurant reservation. It can plug into third-party apps and services, so you’re not restricted to a few bits of first-party software. Honor is also hoping to open out development to the rest of the tech space, as part of a new new ‘Alpha Plan’ corporate strategy that puts open source and co-creation ahead of solo efforts.
Being one step closer to having Iron Man’s JARVIS in your pocket is great and all, but that’s just one aspect of Honor’s planned AI revolution. The others are coming much sooner, with an AI image upscaler set to roll out to the Honor Magic 7 Pro flagship later this month. It uses a mix of on-device and cloud models to boost image clarity by as much as 50%.
The cloud model, which has a whopping 12.4 billion parameters, is already assisting the Magic 7 Pro’s telephoto snaps: beyond 30x, the AI kicks in to generatively add back in any detail the 200MP zoom sensor wasn’t able to capture.
AI deepfake detection is also on the way in April, monitoring video calls for subtle inconsistencies and pixel-level imperfections that could indicate the person you’re nattering away to isn’t who they’re claiming to be. A warning will flash up onscreen if it thinks there’s some digital trickery at play.
These regular app upgrades are part of Honor’s pledge of longer-term software support, which will now flagships getting seven years of new Android generations and security patches. That’s several years more than the firm used to offer, and puts it on par with Google and Samsung as the standard-bearers for Android updates.
In the spirit of open development, Honor has also been working on some iOS-based cross-device connectivity. You’ll be able to wirelessly share files between Android and Apple devices seamlessly, using an updated Honor Share feature. The only downside? Your Apple friends will need to download an app first, so it’s not quite so seamless on their end.