How's this for magic: with nothing more than the HONOR Magic 6 Pro phone, an auto expert controls a full-sized family car simply by looking at the phone's selfie camera. It's no trick: HONOR really did this at the MWC exhibition in Barcelona, and it's a glimpse of the future. With powerful phones, incredible AI and accurate eye-tracking, controlling cars is just the start.
You can check out the video below:
What's so incredible about HONOR's AI
The same tech that HONOR used to control the car could soon be used for our everyday apps. Imagine scrolling through a recipe with your eyes when your hands are busy preparing dinner, or opening a message with your eyes while steering your shopping cart through a supermarket. And that's just the beginning of what AI is going to bring to our phones.
There are no tricks here, no gimmicks, no CGI: just the HONOR Magic Pro 6, its AI and its eye tracking. By tracking which bit of the screen you look at, the phone enables you to send commands to the car instantly: engine on, engine off, move forward and move backward. And there's no need to worry about accidentally sending commands by mistake either: the eye tracking can tell the difference between a deliberate gaze and an accidental glance.
The Magic Portal that'll power up your phone
That's because the Magic Portal understands intent: not just what app you're in but what you want to do. Instead of you having to carry out multiple steps to get things done, Magic Portal knows what the most likely goals will be and shows you the most appropriate options. It's like having a personal assistant that knows exactly what you want, whenever you want it, wherever you need it. Imagine Iron Man's Jarvis – but without you having to clomp about in a giant metal suit.
One of HONOR's latest innovations is called the Magic Portal, and it's an AI-powered feature that can understand what you're trying to do and make it happen. So for example if you wanted to drag content from a website and share it on your socials, or see if a really nice bag is available on eBay, or get your friend's address from your messaging app, send it to Maps and start navigation straight away, the Magic Portal would do all of that instantly and effortlessly.
The future of phones knows just what you need
At the moment, most smartphones rely primarily on screen taps and simple voice commands. But as HONOR is demonstrating with its MagicOS 8.0, the phones of the future will pay much more attention and respond much more intelligently. They'll listen to your words, they'll track your eyes and they'll look at your fingers to automatically identify not just what you're doing but what you want to do.
The difference between what HONOR is demonstrating and what existing tech offers is that HONOR's MagicOS has what the firm calls a "multimodal intent recognition engine". That uses multiple sensors to track your gestures, follow your eye position and to listen to your voice in real time with incredible accuracy.
That enables your phone to know exactly what you're doing, and to pass that information directly to the Magic Live AI Engine. That's where the magic of MagicOS lives: it's an enormously powerful and incredibly clever AI system that can turn those inputs into action, whether that's sending an image to an app, adjusting the text as you read or controlling an entire car.
We've seen the future, and it's looking good
What's really exciting about this is that MagicOS will also be able to lend that power to all kinds ofapps – the apps you use to communicate with your friends or family, the apps that you use for work or for travel, the apps that you use for entertainment and adventure. By enabling your apps to understand you better, HONOR is paving the way for the next generation of apps – apps that'll make life easier, more interesting and a lot more fun.
Click here to find out more about HONOR's amazing car experiment, its innovative MagicOS and how AI and intent analysis will transform the way we use our phones – and maybe our cars too.
