How Huawei is revamping the smartphone universe with Emotion User Interface

Intuitive icon shapes, better speed and battery management, a new chip that performs AI operations on the phone, not on cloud are part of its effort to change how mobile will be used going forward

Huawei, the world’s largest telecom equipment maker and third largest phone brand, is undertaking a major effort towards its mobile operating system to make it more intuitive and useful. The Chinese firm is putting its dollars into artificial intelligence (AI) for new features in a bid to overhaul the mobile experience, something it hopes will set it apart in the sea of smartphone with similar specs and designs.

Huawei calls it EMUI, or Emotion User Interface, which is essentially the company’s proprietary customised operating system powering Huawei smartphones since 2012. Since its early days, and through subsequent iterations, Huawei has focused on putting superior AI capabilities on the device to compliment hardware. From intuitive icon shapes to better speed and battery management, and a powerful new chip that performs AI operations on the phone rather than on the cloud— all of it is part of Huawei's effort to change how mobile will be used in the years to come.

“In the long term, we see mobile becoming an assistant to humans,” says James Lu, senior manager for EMUI, who was earlier head of AI product management. “Right now people install a lot of apps for different services. In future, we believe that people will get things done directly through the phone’s virtual assistant.”

Lu is part of Huawei Consumer Business Group (BG), one of the three business groups at Huawei that focuses on consumer products such as computers, wearables, mobile devices, and cloud services. Earlier he was head of AI product management at BG, where he managed product and planning of AI platform and services. Lu has been with the telecom major since 2001. 

Within EMUI, a number of features and innovations provide a sense of Huawei’s long-term vision for smartphone usability. 

“For long, people have complained that the Android phone gets slower over time. With our new file system, we guarantee the same performance (as with the out-of-the-box model) for 18 months,” says Lu. 

In one of the early versions of EMUI, rolled out in 2016 alongside the HUAWEI Mate 9, the company replaced the conventional EXT4 file system with Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), improving the operating smoothness by 20 per cent. This enabled improved read and write speeds even after prolonged use. 

Three years later, Google applied F2FS in its Pixel 3 flagship smartphone, and other manufacturers soon followed suit. 

The file system innovation is linked to a new chip Huawei has rolled out in its phones- the Kirin series. These chips, designed by Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon, pack a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU), and are purposely built for high intensity tasks involving machine learning and deep learning. The powerful chips power Huawei’s mobile AI platform, which enables will cloud-based AI and on-device AI to run alongside each other, and faster.

The premise of the move is that with AI capabilities on-board, apps will be able to make use of the technology, or run their services, without the internet. 

Huawei is going for the 'ecosystem' approach under which it is asking other developers to build apps and services that combine the use of on-board and cloud AI simultaneously for better results. This open sources platform is called HiAI, and about 1,400 partners and over 500,000 developers have already signed up for it.

“The HiAI mobile computing platform can compile a variety of neural network operators, such as convolution, pooling, activation, and full connecting, into dedicated AI instruction sequences for the NPU in an offline setting, with data and weight rearrangement for optimized performance,” according to the company.

Lu pointed out that something as advanced as image recognition, which requires high computing power and is usually done over the cloud, can now be done over a Huawei phone with HiAI. Further, the mobile assistant on-board a Huawei phone now has computer-vision giving it the ability to recognise objects when the phone’s camera is pointed at them. This opens doors to a number of use cases, said Lu. For instance, using the phone camera and the assistant, Huawei users can recognise land marks, art and painting, translate languages and even bring up calorie information on food items.

The company has also enabled another feature. Users pointing the phone at a merchandise, say a bag, will now the see the product open up on a local e-commerce website and can buy instantly. In India, Huawei has tied up with Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal, among several other e-commerce partners for this service.

Huawei’s EMUI has 470 daily active users in 216 countries globally. The platform supports 77 languages, of which 26 are Indian.