Hey Celia: Huawei’s voice assistant is now live on some devices

We’ve had Siri, Cortana, Assistant, Bixby and Alexa, but there’s yet another voice assistant name you’ll have to get used to this year.

Huawei this week finally made Celia available on the P40 smartphone series running EMUI 10.1.

First noticed by XDA-Developers, we can confirm that Celia is indeed present on our review unit under a new “Huawei Assistant” tab in settings.

The tab also houses Huawei’s other AI options, including AI Lens, AI Search, and AI Touch.

The assistant can be summoned by briefly holding the power key or saying “Hey Celia” which will then allow you to ask about the weather, your agenda, or begin a phone call.

Celia’s commands are fairly rudimentary for now. It works well for EMUI app-related commands, but struggles to “understand” more contextual queries.

For instance, “switch on the torch” works just fine, but telling Celia to “switch it off” will produce “sorry, I didn’t understand that”. It’s a response you’ll hear for a number of questions about, say, today’s news.

Celia’s definitely a work in progress, but for South Africans it might take a while before they get to experience it.

While the P40 Lite has arrived in the country, the rest of the P40 series may only arrive in June.

Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn