Search, chat and eye tracking

Admittedly, my colleague Camila Rinaldi didn’t have an easy time with her first short test of the Honor Magic 6 Pro. Many of the promised AI features are not yet available on our test device and will only be rolled out in the coming weeks via an over-the-air update. We will then also update the first hands-on experience of the smartphone, and of course there will also be a final test result.

But until then, we were able to get a look at two new AI features at MWC. Here are our first impressions.

Honor Gate: Participation on steroids

My favorite AI feature from Honor is called “Portal”. This is a sidebar to which you can drag and drop almost any content. Depending on the content, the smartphone then displays different options.

For example, if you drag a product image from your WhatsApp history to the sidebar, you’ll see eBay and Instagram as options if you want to buy the product or post the image. For the address, on the other hand, Google Maps, Gmail and several messengers will appear so you can share a specific location if necessary.

Once the information is entered into the portal bar, the relevant provider takes over the information and eBay’s reverse image search, for example, finds the desired product.

Ultimately, the feature is practical, but not revolutionary. Tagging addresses and starting navigation right away has already worked for several generations of Android and iOS, and reverse searches using Google Lens or sharing photos aren’t particularly complicated tasks.

However, the basic idea of ​​the sidebar is nice, and further development can be envisioned in the future. For example, a smartphone can recognize who appears in a featured photo and directly display the appropriate contact, including the preferred communication channel. The first version of Portal should be available on the Honor Magic 6 Pro by mid-March 2024.

Local LLM powered by Llama 2

The second AI feature was launched at MWC 2024 under the working title “AI Demo” on the Honor Magic 6 Pro. You guessed it: it’s going to take a little longer than using Portal before this functionality makes its way to a smartphone. However, the demo was interesting because Llama 2 was used as a native text-to-text model.

In other words, you have a universal chatbot on your smartphone that answers all conceivable questions without sending your private information over the cloud. This is important, for example, if you want to get a transcript of sensitive content.

At MWC, the AI ​​model answered various questions in English, including a steak recipe. If you ask very specific things that Llama 2 cannot answer, LLM will turn to the familiar hallucinations of text-to-text and visualization models. For example, nextpit is listed as a provider of AI solutions for businesses. But as mentioned earlier: This issue also exists in ChatGPT & Co. Honor has not yet been able to give us a specific launch date.

Eyetracking bonus feature: Blink of an eye?

Even if this isn’t a direct AI feature, we were also able to try out the eye tracking on the Honor platform. Honor Magic 6 Pro watches you through the front camera, and you can trigger a specific action by focusing your gaze. In the demo, for example, the notification can be expanded to read all the text. Answering calls also works this way. This is useful, for example, if your hands are busy and you don’t want to spoil your phone.

In practice, this feature will likely fall into the same category as “DoubleTap” on the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2. There will likely be a few special cases or users for whom this feature is important on a regular basis in daily life. But I doubt audiences will regularly use the eye-tracking feature, at least in its current configuration.

What do you think of the three features – which is your favorite? And are you already using similar AI functions on your current smartphone?