Source: Huawei has 100+ engineers developing a smartphone digital assistant for its Chinese users, aimed at competing with Siri
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 report is the origin point of a line that ran for nearly a decade: Huawei committing serious engineering headcount to a voice assistant built for Chinese users rather than licensing or imitating Siri. Three years later that investment surfaced publicly as Celia, the multilingual assistant Huawei shipped on the P40 outside China.
The competitive frame has since inverted. By 2025 Apple was the one playing catch-up in China, reportedly working with Baidu on AI-powered Siri search for iPhone users there even after adding Alibaba as a second partner, while Huawei's own stack culminated in HarmonyOS 7's agent-friendly architecture connecting 2,000+ specialized AI agents.
First-order effects
- Huawei gains a differentiated software feature for its Chinese handset base at a moment when Siri offered no comparable localized experience, giving buyers one more reason to stay on Huawei hardware.
Second-order effects
- Apple is eventually forced into the position Huawei occupied in 2017: bolting local Chinese AI partners onto Siri to keep its China installed base competitive, as the Baidu and Alibaba work shows.
- The effort feeds Huawei's broader push to embed AI across consumer electronics and telecom equipment, including domestically developed data center chips reported the following year.
Third-order effects
- Voice assistants harden into market-specific operating layers: each major phone ecosystem ships a sovereign AI stack tuned to its home market, and cross-border defaults like Siri need local partnerships to compete at all.
- A decade on, the same engineering investment underpins an agent platform — Huawei's trajectory suggests early assistant teams become the foundation for OS-level AI architectures, not just chat features.
The trend: Smartphone assistants are evolving from imported features into domestically built AI layers, with Chinese vendors' early Siri rivals maturing into full agent platforms while Apple depends on local partners to stay relevant in China.