Once deprived of services, why not create your own? Well, since the Trump ban, Huawei has been on over drive to to replace all the Google services that they have been deprived of. The Chinese manufacturer has been forced to develop its own tools and the latest addition is named Celia: a voice assistant, rival to Google Assistant, Siri, or even Alexa, which will, initially, be available in six countries and three languages.
There is no doubt that Celia sounds a lot more like Apple’s Siri– but who are we to judge? The new voice assistant was demoed by the company during the launch and it has been designed to be a multilingual voice assistant, developed in-house. In fact, Huawei has a big advantage when creating Celia, this is not a complete novelty, a similar app was already offered to Chinese users, under the name of Xiaoyi. But Huawei will now offer it internationally.
Countries where Celia will initially launched
To start, the service will only be available in six countries. Consequently, Celia will be able to communicate in three languages: French, English and Spanish. So the countries include;
- France
- United Kingdom
- Spain
- Chile
- Mexico
- Colombia
This initiative obviously follows the measures taken by the American government against the Chinese manufacturer. No longer able to use Google’s services, the brand has therefore decided to develop its own tools, including its AppGallery application store and therefore now its virtual assistant.
Devices to support the new voice assitant
Celia will be integrated into the P40 and P40 Pro, the new range of flagships from Huawei and also the newly announced Huawei X sound bar. To activate it, just pronounce “Hey Celia”, at least in its English version.
Celia actions
Once triggered, the voice assistant will be able to perform several classic actions: give the weather, call someone, send an SMS … But it can also play the role of a translator in real-time with the function “face to face translate”. This allows two people in the same room to communicate in two different languages (French, English or Spanish). Celia will take care of displaying the translation instantly on the phone of each interlocutor.
