Chinese gadget manufacturer Honor just teased its forthcoming flagship smartphone, the Magic 6, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit. While many details of the phone remain mysterious, the company did announce that it would include built-in eye-tracking and an on-board artificial intelligence powered by a large language model (LLM.)
One of the phone’s key features is something called Magic Capsule, an “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction.” Eye-tracking has some potential real world uses when it comes to smartphones, as the sensors and cameras can perform actions based on where you’re looking. So you can open up an app or engage with content on the phone simply by staring at the right spot.
This could be a game-changer for those with disabilities, allowing near-total access to the device via minute eye movements. However, some folks may get a bit queasy with the idea of our phones tracking every single thing we stare at.
While the actual specs of the Magic 6 are still under wraps, Honor did announce the presence of an on-board LLM. This built-in chatbot is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chipset.
It’s important to note the distinction here. This is an on-board LLM. Typically when you engage with an AI chatbot or service on your phone, you’re fiddling with a cloud-based LLM that exists on a server somewhere. With the Magic 6, every piece of data that the chatbot will access is already on the phone.
This should drastically increase the speed and reliability of results, potentially turning the phone into one heck of a personal assistant, as it’ll have access to everything on the device, including your photos, contacts, videos and more. Despite this unfettered access, the Magic 6 should actually be more private than competing smartphones, as everything stays on the device and isn’t shuffled off to the cloud.
The company showed off some nifty features that take advantage of this technology. The smart assistant, nicknamed YOYO, can create short videos based on footage stored on the phone via a simple chat prompt. You can also adjust templates, themes and music with similar prompts. The bot will also collect images and videos stored on your phone that match a specific search criteria, with more use case scenarios to be revealed at a later date.
Honor’s Magic 6 flagship smartphone was just announced and the company didn’t provide a release date or cost information. However, Qualcomm says that phones featuring its new chipset will begin shipping in the coming weeks, so the Magic 6 could be one of them. In the meantime, Honor for itself in the folding phone space.
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