Honor’s Yoyo Assistant, an AI agent designed to learn its users preferences, is combining with DeepSeek-R1 to up its language processing and performance. The planned result is a more capable assistant that better understands requests and context. There’s no global launch date for this upgrade yet, but it MagicOS 8.0+ users began to see it roll out on February 8.
Honor says more than 130 million people already use the Yoyo Assistant on a monthly basis, and the company only expects that number to go up as the DeepSeek upgrade becomes available. DeepSeek is one of the most advanced AI models on the market, yielding even better results than GPT-4o, but it has also been at the center of a lot of controversy around censorship and data privacy.
Aside from its performance, DeepSeek has become a popular option because it’s essentially open source. It uses an MIT license, which means companies can use it without jumping through hoops. As a result, other phone companies like Nubia and Oppo have also announced plans to integrate DeepSeek into their own assistants.
Just yesterday, Oppo announced the Oppo Find N5 will launch with DeepSeek-R1 integration. It isn’t clear if the global version of the Find N5 (the OnePlus Open 2) will also sport the upgraded AI.
So far, the DeepSeek-R1 upgrade is limited to the Chinese market. However, should it move beyond national borders, the language model has the potential to revolutionize how the everyday person interacts with artificial intelligence. Due to its open source nature, developers can add onto the model and modify it to their specific needs — and that opens a world of possible applications.
