Your phone knows what you're thinking! Honor launches MagicOS 8.0 - world's first intent-based UI

The smartphones in our pockets can do a lot of things, but wouldn't it be great if they took a little initiative and started helping us without the annoyance of telling them to do so? This may sound like science fiction, but Honor thinks otherwise. The company has just launched its next-gen mobile software called Magic OS 8.0 in China, and it features clever AI magic onboard. Honor even calls this "world's first intent-based UI (IUI)." But what does that mean?

What is an intent-based user interface?

First things first, the beating heart of this software system is an AI hardware chip (though Honor doesn't disclose any details about it), and with its help, Magic OS 8.0 can do some wild stuff. Oh, and by the way, Honor also launched its MagicLM, which is a large language model not dissimilar to the infamous ChatGPT. So, what are these magical new things we're talking about?

Magic Portal - your phone now knows what you need

This is the part where your phone takes the initiative. In the press release, Honor talks about human-device interactions and how cumbersome they were, using text and touch interfaces. Well, no more. Honor says that "instead of acting upon request, MagicOS 8.0 renders services according to user intentions." It sounds a bit like the sci-fi movie Minority Report.

This is based on platform-level AI. MagicOS 8.0 can "interpret language, images, gestures, and eye movements to understand a user’s intent and offer services proactively."

Let's say you're looking at a review of the Honor Magic5 Pro. The IUI will automatically take you to a page where you can buy the phone. Or if the phone hears you saying something like "Gosh, I need a new case for this phone," it will offer a bunch of cases for your specific phone.

"Let's go to Tiffany's" will start Baidu Map (the software debuts with support for over 100 apps in China) and set a navigation to the closest jewelry store. In China, this will be integrated with MagicRing, meaning the AI will be available across different devices, including cars, smart speakers, and more.

MagicLM - your AI can understand you

After the shock that ChatGPT created with its quite astonishing capabilities to understand human language and carry out different tasks, all the big tech companies around the world went back to the proverbial drawing boards. This has resulted in numerous AI language models, from Google's own Bard to countless other not-so-popular little AI entities.

MagicLM is Honor's version, which operates at a platform level, and it's optimized and collaboratively developed with Qualcomm. It uses all the benefits of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and features seven billion parameters (whatever this means).

You're getting the usual AI magic; this language model can understand natural language, meaning you can speak to it like speaking to a human, and it can also convert text to speech and vice versa, analyze data, answer questions, you know, the usual AI stuff. Honor boasts that using this language model, you can find a specific frame in videos just by saying out loud what you're looking for. It sounds amazing, but we need to test it.

My phone is listening to me. I feel a bit paranoid now

We live in an era where people are constantly worried about their digital security. Honor says that thanks to the fact that MagicOS 8.0 uses platform-based AI, all the data stays on the device, and it's safeguarded there, behind a secured virtual space called Parallel Space.

We're pretty excited about this new UI and can't wait to test it out in person. It has the potential to transform the way we interact with our phones or be a huge pain in the arm. We won't be surprised if other big manufacturers follow suit or launch their generative AI-based interfaces this year, so stay tuned for that. The word of the year will most definitely be AI.