‘Huawei worked on its own smart speaker with Google Assistant until trade ban’

According to sources, Huawei was working on its own smart speaker, similar to that of Google or Amazon. The speaker would work with Google Assistant, but the plans have been put on hold by the US trade ban.

According to sources from The Information, Huawei would like to announce the smart speaker during the IFA fair in Berlin this year. The speaker should also be immediately available to the whole world, and target users outside their home country of China. The Information is based on anonymous sources within Huawei.

According to the website’s sources, plans for Huawei are already at an advanced stage. “We had been working with Google on this project for a year and had come a long way. Then everything suddenly stopped,” an anonymous employee told the site. The project was halted after US President Trump imposed a trade ban on US companies working with Huawei. As a result, Huawei could no longer use Android, and although the trade ban has now been partially suspended, many products are still not delivered or delivered with a delay.

It is not the first time that Huawei is working on its own smart speaker. Last year it already released a device in China that ran on its own assistant Xiaoyi, and before that it released the AI ​​Cube that ran on Amazon’s Alexa, but flopped.