Tecno brings the best of mobile AI to affordable phones

Tecno revealed a range of AI innovations coming to its smartphones at IFA 2024. The company — which often makes devices that combine innovation with affordability — looks set to jump on board the AI ​​bandwagon with an approach that combines the best of Apple and Google’s AI achievements to date.

“We will focus on AI language localization, including translation of minority languages ​​and development of semantic recognition; the focus will be on integrating AI and local applications that can turn smart devices into personalized personal assistants, helping users hail a taxi, navigate, order takeaways, and more, all in a seamless and functional way,” Tecno said.

A notable addition is the internal Ella AI assistant, which now has the foundations of Google’s Gemini. In my own experience with Gemini so far, it’s much more capable of processing natural language commands, including back-and-forth conversations.

One of the most practical AI integrations is real-time translation, which Tecno says will work for both phone calls and face-to-face conversations by transcribing speech into text.

It looks like Ella Assistant will also intelligently sort commands across apps. In a video shared by Tecno, when users tell the AI ​​to order a ride, it will do so, with options available across apps all available on one dashboard.

The company is also taking some inspiration from Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence. It will summarize both local and web content, enabling seamless editing, proofreading, rewriting, style adjustments, and content generation from scratch.

Tecno also supports its own implementation of Circle to Search, one of the best AI tricks to hit a smartphone to date. The company’s iteration is called AI Search, which involves swiping the screen to let users check what’s appearing on their phone’s screen.

The company is also delving into the artistic side of AI, which lets users create images from text prompts. Tecno calls it AI Artboard, but hasn’t said what image generation model is being used here. But given the Gemini integration, we think it could be Google Imagen working its magic here.

Tecno is also borrowing from Google Photos’ AI editing toolset, bringing some of those ideas to its AI Image Editing stack. The AI ​​assistant will also help with image manipulation using natural language commands like “lighten skin tone,” “make eyes look bigger,” or “remove car from background.”

It offers features like AI Erase to seamlessly remove unwanted elements from an image, AI Cutout to extract a selected element from photos, and even generate a video. While the IFA 2024 announcements focused on AI and software, Tecno recently made headlines with its hardware as well when it showed off the exciting Phantom Ultimate 2 tri-fold phone.