Huawei Says They’re Adding Amazon Alexa to the Mate 9

At the start of November, Huawei officially announced the Mate 9, Mate 9 Pro, and the Mate 9 Porsche Design phones to the world. We had seen multiple rumors of this device leading up to the official announcement, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when it was shown off to the public. Recently, Huawei announced they would be releasing the Mate 9 in the United States, and they were even at CES this year to show it off to the press.

At the electronics expo, Huawei revealed some interesting details about the device’s launch too. While we have seen Amazon Alexa launched in a number of products lately, and it was a ton of products at CES this year, it hasn’t been used in a smartphone that didn’t carry the Amazon brand. Huawei wants to change with this with Mate 9, and says they’ll be updating the software in the near future to add the service.

This is really interesting as we’ve seen reports recently that claim manufacturers are upset with Google for giving their own hardware preferential treatment when it comes to Google Assistant. Sure, you can use it in the Allo messaging application, but it’s not baked into the OS like it is with the Pixel and the Pixel XL. So this could very well be the reason why Huawei has opted for Alexa with the upcoming release of the Mate 9 in the United States.

Amazon Alexa on the Huawei Mate 9 is said to compete head to head with the likes of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Assistant. Although, it’s not known if it will be built into the core OS, or if it will just be a 3rd-party application loaded onto the phone. The report from FierceWireless says Huawei will be pushing the app to the device in an upcoming OTA update, so that suggests the integration won’t be thorough.

It seems the personal AI assistant market is getting crowded these days, and even Samsung is rumored to launch their own soon as well. We would like to know which one you like the most in the comments section below!

Source: FierceWireless

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