We have been anticipating — and we obtained — loads of speak about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm’s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. However the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship got here with a stunning element: it features a function that permits you to work together with the machine utilizing your eyes. With some notable considerations about privateness implications, it seems kinda cool.
The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this know-how will appear like, exhibiting a lady taking a look at her cellphone with a snippet of the Uber app operating on the prime of the display screen — something like a Live Activity. By altering the course of her gaze, she opens the app in full.
Honor calls the know-how Magic Capsule, and describes it as “eye-tracking primarily based multimodal interplay,” which is extra descriptive however much less fanciful than Magic Capsule.
It’s one function on the upcoming Magic 6 that can even function a digital assistant that makes use of Qualcomm’s on-device AI. You possibly can ask it to do issues like collect all of the movies in your machine that meet a sure standards, whittle them down by different traits, and have it generate a brand new video highlighting your clips. We’re going to see much more of that sort of factor within the close to future, too, as a result of this 12 months’s Snapdragon Summit is All About AI. We have been quarter-hour into the principle keynote earlier than 5G was even uttered as soon as, for the report.
Whether or not — and the way — Magic Capsule works is a query mark. The demo video is hardly a real-life illustration, and it looks like a function with the potential to introduce extra frustration than it’s value. The “multi-modal” descriptor appears to point that gaze is only one enter within the system, so it could possibly be coupled with different gestures to work reliably —maybe like how we’ve seen PSVR 2 games use eye-tracking to spotlight issues earlier than you click on to substantiate. Additionally: do you need your cellphone to know the place you’re wanting? It’s no small difficulty if you’re speaking a few state-backed firm like Honor.
All of that apart, it’s good to see machine OEMs pushing for advances in how we use our telephones that don’t start and finish with an AI chatbot. Dependable eye-tracking know-how would have some actual accessibility advantages, and it’s not entirely out of left field. It could possibly be useful for moments when your palms are full — Apple actually appears to suppose there’s a necessity for new ways of controlling your devices.
Honor hasn’t mentioned particularly when the Magic 6 will ship, however Qualcomm says that telephones with its new flagship chipset will begin arriving within the coming weeks.