TikTok owner ByteDance has entered the race against Apple to define the future of smartphones by putting its artificial intelligence agent Doubao into a ZTE-made handset.
The Beijing-based company on Monday launched the Doubao Mobile Assistant in a technical preview, describing it as “an operating-system-level collaboration between ByteDance’s Doubao [AI model] and mobile phone manufacturers” that “brings more convenient interaction and richer capabilities”, according to a post on Monday on its official WeChat account.
A video demonstration showed how the assistant could tell a story from a picture, edit the pedestrians out of a photo, identify the lowest price of the same product on multiple shopping apps and make purchases with the user’s consent.
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It could also book restaurants and transport as well as add the latest podcast episode to a playlist.
All the functions could be activated via voice commands.
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To showcase the technology, ByteDance has partnered with Chinese telecoms giant ZTE to release a limited-run “engineering prototype”: the Nubia M153. Priced at 3,499 yuan (US$494), the device features a 6.78-inch screen and a 50 million-pixel triple-camera system on the back and runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor.