Virtual assistants have become quite common over the past year and it’s no longer surprising to hear whenever it’s reported that a tech company is now working on its own smart assistant. Similar reports have also surfaced about Huawei and word on the street now is that Huawei’s assistant is going to have higher emotional intelligence than its rivals. The company’s AI assistant team has apparently been inspired by the movie Her.
Huawei offers a voice assistant to its customers in China already but the company is now planning on something entirely different. Felix Zhang, Huawei’s vice president of software engineering, has said that “We want to provide emotional interactions. We think that, in the future, all our end users wish they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run.”
He also added that the movie Her is an inspiration to him and other Huawei executives on the team. “Like in the movie, you can even get rid of your girlfriend. This is quite emotional service providing,” he said. Zhang also added that in the future users may not even have to touch their devices to use them as they will be able to access most commonly used features through voice commands.
It might be a while before we see an assistant with such high emotional intelligence from Huawei or any other company for that matter but it’s clear that the industry will be moving into that direction.