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At IFA 2024, Tecno is revealing a range of AI innovations that will soon land on its smartphones, and it seems the company — which makes devices that often blend innovation with affordability — is jumping on board the AI trend with an approach that blends the best of what Apple and Google have done with AI so far.
“A focus on AI language localization, including minority language translation and semantic recognition development; the focus will be the integration of AI and local apps, which can turn smart devices into customized personal assistants, helping users to call a taxi, navigate, order takeout, and more, all in a flowing and functional way,” claims Tecno.
A notable addition is the in-house Ella AI assistant, which now has Google’s Gemini foundations. From my own experience with Gemini so far, it has proved to be a lot more capable at processing natural language commands, including back-and-forth conversations.
One of the most practical AI integrations is real-time translations, which Tecno claims will work for both phone calls, as well as in-person conversations, by transcribing speech into text.
It seems the Ella Assistant will also intelligently sort out commands across different apps. In a video shared by Tecno, when users tell the AI to hail a ride, it does so, complete with options available across different apps on a single dashboard.
The company is also taking a bit of inspiration from the Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence. It will summarize both local as web content, allowing for seamless editing, proofreading, rewriting, style adjustment, and content generation from scratch.
Tecno is also serving up its own implementation of Circle to Search, one of the best AI tricks to land on smartphones so far. The company’s iteration is called AI Search, and it relies on screen swipe to let users look up what’s appearing on their phone’s screen.
The company is also dipping into the artistic side of AI, one that allows users to create images from text prompts. Tecno is calling it AI Artboard, but hasn’t said what image-generation model is at play here. But given the Gemini integration, we believe it could be Google Images working its magic here.
Tecno is also borrowing from the Google Photos AI editing toolkit, porting over some of those ideas into its AI Image Editing stack. The AI assistant will also help with image manipulation using natural language commands, such as “brighten the skin tone,” “make the eyes look bigger,” or “remove the car from the background.”
It brings capabilities like AI Erase to seamlessly remove unwanted elements from an image, AI Cutout to pull out a selected element from pictures, and even video generation. While its IFA 2024 announcements have focused on AI and software, Tecno recently hit the headlines with hardware too, when it showed off the exciting trifold Phantom Ultimate 2 concept folding phone.
