Honor Integrates DeepSeek-R1 AI Model into Yoyo Assistant, Boosting Smartphone AI Capabilities

Honor's Yoyo Assistant gets a DeepSeek upgrade

Honor's Yoyo Assistant, an AI agent designed to learn its users preferences, is combining with DeepSeek-R1 to up its language processing and performance. The planned result is a more capable assistant that better understands requests and context. There's no global launch date for this upgrade yet, but it MagicOS 8.0+ users began to see it roll out on February 8. Honor says more than 130 million people already use the Yoyo Assistant on a monthly basis, and the company only expects that number to go up as the DeepSeek upgrade becomes available. DeepSeek is one of the most advanced AI models on the market, yielding even better results than GPT-4o, but it has also been at the center of a lot of controversy around censorship and data privacy. Recommended Videos Aside from its performance, DeepSeek has become a popular option because it's essentially open source. It uses an MIT license, which means companies can use it without jumping through hoops. As a result, other phone companies like Nubia and Oppo have also announced plans to integrate DeepSeek into their own assistants. Just yesterday, Oppo announced the Oppo Find N5 will launch with DeepSeek-R1 integration. It isn't clear if the global version of the Find N5 (the OnePlus Open 2) will also sport the upgraded AI. Please enable Javascript to view this content So far, the DeepSeek-R1 upgrade is limited to the Chinese market. However, should it move beyond national borders, the language model has the potential to revolutionize how the everyday person interacts with artificial intelligence. Due to its open source nature, developers can add onto the model and modify it to their specific needs -- and that opens a world of possible applications.

Honor Integrates DeepSeek AI Into YOYO Assistant, Making It Smarter Than Ever - Phandroid

Honor is taking a big step forward in AI by integrating DeepSeek into its YOYO virtual assistant, making it much smarter and more natural to interact with. This upgrade will be available for all Honor smartphones running MagicOS 8.0 or later. To access the new DeepSeek-powered YOYO, Honor users need to upgrade it to version 80.0.1.503 or higher. Once updated, YOYO will gain natural language processing, allowing it to understand and respond more like a human. Conversations will feel smoother, and the assistant will be far more useful in daily tasks. The company also claims that this will allow the assistant to offer up logical reasoning and contextual understanding. This move is similar what Google is doing with Gemini AI on Android. However, since Google services aren't available in China, this is an alternative for users in China. Many China companies are developing AI models of their own. However, what makes DeepSeek so impressive its capabilities which appear to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. With this integration, Honor is actually ahead of some other big names in tech, such as Apple. Apple's Siri still lacks"Apple Intelligence" integration. This leaves iPhone users without a smarter assistant. Honor isn't wasting any time. This upgrade could give the company a lead when it comes to AI-powered smartphones. It could also potentially allow the company to have a leg up on other tech giants such as Samsung who largely relies on Google for a lot of its software features and capabilities in its Android-powered smartphones.

Honor's Yoyo Assistant Will Now Support DeepSeek-R1 AI Model

Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand, announced the integration of its Yoyo virtual assistant with the DeepSeek-R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model on Saturday. The company claimed to have become the first Android manufacturer to offer the AI model in its devices. With this, the company's native assistant will be able to tap into the capabilities of the reasoning model to complete complex tasks. Notably, in the previous weeks, Perplexity and Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry have also added the DeepSeek-R1 model as an on-platform offering. Notably, the Yoyo assistant is currently only available in China. In a post on Weibo, the official handle of Honor announced the integration and the new capabilities that the Yoyo assistant will now support. The large language model (LLM) is available for those using MagicOS 8.0 and newer with the Yoyo assistant version 80.0.1.503 and newer. To use DeepSeek-R1, Honor users in China will have to go to the Yoyo smart store and find the model to initiate a conversation with it. The DeepSeek welcome screen contains the description, "I am an intelligent agent based on the open-source version of the DeepSeek-R1, dedicated to bringing users an immersive deep thinking experience, helping users to dig deeper and gain insight into the essence in the process of exploring knowledge, solving problems, and stimulating creativity," as per a Huawei Central report. Notably, the integration has currently been rolled out in beta, and as such, it might come with glitches and bugs that can dampen the user experience. As per Honor, DeepSeek-R1 will improve the virtual assistant's natural language processing, logical reasoning, and contextual understanding of complex commands. The company also announced that more than 13 crore monthly active users use the Yoyo virtual assistant. The DeepSeek-R1 is a reasoning-focused model with chain-of-thought (CoT) transparency. This means users can see the thought process of the AI while it breaks down complex problems, double guesses its output and verifies it using alternative methods. The company did not reveal whether the AI model will also be able to communicate and draw information from other apps or not. While the current rollout only includes China, it is unclear whether Honor will also introduce the open-source AI model to global markets. Notably, the Chinese AI model has faced security concerns after a cybersecurity firm found evidence in the DeepSeek chatbot's source code that links it to a Chinese telecom firm that is banned in the US. Australian government and regulators in Italy have already banned the AI platform.