Huawei has come up with a new personal assistant exclusively developed to work with its phones. Dubbed as Celia, the Chinese tech giant's recently unveiled AI helper is expected to outplace the Google Assistant.

Huawei will be making the newfangled digital assistant available to its phone users via an OTA (Over-The-Air) update. However, details about an exact timeline for that are still scarce. The assistant can be activated by using the phrase "Hey, Celia," or by pressing and holding the phone's power button for one second.

Huawei hinted at an imminent debut of Celia in 2019 when Alex Huang was Director of the company's consumer division. While talking to French media outlets, Huang touted Celia as the global version Huawei's personal assistant in China dubbed Xiaoyi. The Chinese assistant is still available in Huawei's AI Cube smart speaker and a slew of handsets it sells in the country.

Currently pre-loaded on the Huawei P40, Celia resorts to using search engines available in the Huawei Browser while responding to search queries, Android Authority reported. For the sake of an instance, Celia uses Microsoft Bing in the UK; however, users can choose Google Search as well. On the downside, consumers will not be able to change the browser Celia uses.

To develop Celia, Huawei had initiated an exclusive collaboration with Qwant, Google's competitor in Europe. While nothing is set in stone yet, and Huawei is still mum about it, there is a possibility that in Europe, the AI assistant could use search results generated by Qwant in a bid to answer user questions.

It is worth mentioning here that Huawei is currently subject to a ban in the United States. As a result, the company is not allowed to do business with several American firms. This is also why Huawei-branded phones now come without Google Mobile Services such as the Google Assistant.

At the moment, Celia supports three languages including Spanish, French, as well as English. The assistant is slated to first roll out in Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As far as capabilities are concerned, Celia can perform a slew of useful tasks such as making calls, sending text messages, setting calendar reminders, playing music, translating, checking the weather, etc.

Aside from that, Celia has AI vision functions similar to Google Lens. For example, it can scan a food item and show the calories you'd be consuming if you eat it. As if that weren't enough, it can help you with online shopping by scanning a picture and searching identical products up for sale.

Huawei plans to add a myriad of other features to its assistant while making it available to users across the globe. Celia will also be available on various other Huawei devices such as TVs, speakers shortly.