Honor launches AI phone tools that help users get online shopping discounts

BEIJING — Imagine if Amazon offered a 20% discount on every purchase made with an iPhone Air.

This is essentially how Chinese smartphone maker Honor wants to attract local buyers – by giving them an on-device AI tool that lets them quickly compare deals across Chinese e-commerce sites, including JD.com And different traders on AlibabaTaobao. In one example seen by CNBC, Honor AI-powered shopping search helped save 20% because the tool was able to find coupons that a user might otherwise ignore.

The features and a slew of other AI functions are set to roll out on Wednesday on Honor’s newly launched Magic8 smartphone as well as the company’s other devices in China. The timing is notable. China is entering its busiest shopping season of the year similar to Black Friday: Singles’ Day promotional period on November 11.

With the AI ​​upgrade, Honor expects to climb into the top three smartphone brands in terms of market share in mainland China by the end of this year, Fei Fang, head of product at Honor Device, told CNBC in an exclusive interview. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the remarks provided in Mandarin.

In the future, she expects that instead of opening smartphone apps directly, users will increasingly be able to access functions via an AI portal – which can then automatically provide personalized services in the future.

“We believe this will happen and we are working in this direction,” she said, noting that Honor will launch more AI features in sports, health and companionship at its ecosystem conference on October 23.

Honor’s AI features are activated through the company’s “Yoyo” chatbot, which sits inside the company’s Android-based operating system called MagicOS.

While Honor said the overseas market now accounts for about half of its revenue, the Shenzhen-based company must take over first. apple To regain first place in China.

In the second quarter of this year, Huawei and Vivo shipped the most phones in China, with a market share of 18% each, while Oppo and Vivo shipped Xiaomi They competed for second place with 16% each. Counterpoint Data showed. apple At 15%, followed by Honor at 13%.

Apple has tried to create Back in China this year. CEO Tim Cook visited Shanghai this week, he said Social media Account, coinciding with the news that the slim iPhone Air will finally start sales in China this month – weeks after the new iPhone 17 arrives in stores.

However, the US smartphone giant has yet to launch its AI features in China, despite Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai announcing this year that the company would do so. Working with Apple On technical tools. Neither side has yet released additional details.

New AI features are also coming for China users like ChatGPT Start allowing US users to shop On Etsy, and Coming soon to Walmartthrough the chatbot AI interface. Other AI-powered chatbots can also search the internet for specific products.

It remains to be seen whether AI will always be useful to consumers. But Honor said its advantage comes from using AI to complete multiple steps, including calculating individual e-commerce memberships and personalized coupons, to show consumers the cheapest option – with a prompt as simple as asking for the best deal on a product.

Honor said most of the new AI features are based on a self-developed Graphical User Interface (GUI) AI model that learns from how a human interacts with a smartphone screen and across apps.

The company claimed that the AI’s learning ability enabled rapid expansion from 200 missions in July to more than 3,000 missions this fall.

In other cases, Honor said it has entered into agreements with companies such as food delivery giant Meituan and video streaming platform Bilibili to allow the phone’s artificial intelligence to interact with Chinese app systems using… Model Context Protocol (MCP) technology invented by Anthropic.

Honor also includes some AI functions from other companies, e.g KuaishuKling AI video creation model. Since Kling and other tools charge a per-use fee, that comes at the expense of the smartphone company, which currently offers the features to consumers for free, according to Fang.

“This is one of the current challenges we face,” Fang said. “We have invested a lot of money in AI. But we believe that we must first create value for consumers before commercialization.”

Honor announced in March that it would spend $10 billion on artificial intelligence over the next five years. The company indicated that it will make a large portion of the initial investment this year.

The spending is part of Honor’s ambitious plan announced in March to become an Honor company Artificial intelligence hardware company – A platform to connect companies with consumers. Like Apple, Honor also sells smartwatches, tablets, and laptops.

Outside of China, Honor is working with Google in the field of artificial intelligence and is ranked Fourth in terms of market share in Europe As of the second quarter, according to Counterpoint.

While Honor has no immediate plans to roll out AI-powered shopping overseas, the company at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March showed off an AI agent for Make restaurant reservations on OpenTable.