Huawei developing virtual assistant that provides ‘emotional interactions’

Warner Bros.

If you’ve seen the 2013 film Her, you have a bit of an idea what Huawei is working on in the virtual assistant space. The Chinese company is said to be developing a new assistant that will “provide emotional interactions.” Huawei’s Vice President of Software Engineering Felix Zhang talked to CNBC about this. He said, “We want to provide emotional interactions. We think that, in the future, all our end users wish [that] they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run.”

The company is hoping users would want to keep interacting with its assistant so they don’t feel as alone, similar to what happened in Her. Now, whether this is something users really want is probably the more important question. What do you think?

Meet Facebook’s hybrid virtual assistant M

It’s like Siri and Cortana but not really. It’s more than that. At least, that’s what Facebook claims its new virtual assistant is. It’s genderless for one, making it more like Google Now than the aforementioned assistants from Apple and Microsoft. Another is it doesn’t just purely rely on AI; there’s a human element to it at the moment. Called the M trainers, these people make the tough call when a request seems too complicated for the AI. The service is being tested now around the Bay Area in the US and Facebook hopes to bring this to all Messenger users.

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