Huawei’s Celia Voice Assistant Activates Apple’s Siri: Here’s Why

| Published: Friday, March 27, 2020, 21:26 [IST]

Voice assistants are now available on every smartphone. While there's Google Assistant for Android devices, Apple introduced Siri for its ecosystem. At the same time, there's Microsoft Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Huawei's Celia. The Huawei Celia is one of the latest addition, launched alongside the Huawei P40 series and it looks like it has a couple of faults.

Huawei Celia Introduced

Huawei launched its flagship P40 series on March 26 and with it, introduced the new voice assistant. The three new devices, namely the Huawei P40 5G, Huawei P40 Pro 5G, and Huawei P40 Pro+ 5G, are now enabled with the Celia voice assistant. Just like the Google Assistant and Apple's Siri, the Huawei Celia can be activated with "Hey, Celia".

Hey Celia Activates Hey Siri

However, there seems to be a defect in Huawei Celia. Instead of opening up Celia's capability, Huawei's assistant activates Apple's voice assistant. The discovery comes from Avi Greengart, a tech market analyst, who tweeted about Celia's functioning.

Looking back, it's been a couple of months since Huawei has been banned from working with the US companies, including Google. This means that Huawei can't put Google software on its phones like the Google Play Store or even Google Assistant.

However, Huawei brought in Celia, not only to its home market in China, but also to the western market. Huawei designed Celia to accept commands in English, French, and Spanish with the activation phrase ‘Hey Celia'. But what Greengart points out is that ‘Hey Celia' sounds quite similar to ‘Hey Siri'.

The tweet notes that when commanding ‘Hey Celia', the nearby Apple devices respond with Siri. This was further pointed out in a YouTube video by tech analyst Marques Brownlee, who showed how ‘Hey Celia' activates Siri on an iPhone.

Huawei P40 Smartphone With App Gallery

The new Huawei P40 series smartphones are impressive, no doubt. It comes with a 6.10-inch display with the in-house HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G processor under the hood. The Huawei P40 5G device comes with a triple-camera module at the rear with a 50MP primary shooter coupled with a 16MP and an 8MP sensors.

However, the Huawei P40 series lacks any of the Google services, which many Android users could be hesitant to buy. Of course, Huawei has its own App Gallery, just like the Google Play Store. However, it remains to see how the market outside China will accept the new P40 series.