Xiaomi’s Senior Vice President, Wang Xiang, has confirmed that the company is working closely with Google in order to bring Google Assistant to its smartphones. That being said, the Google Assistant is already available on the Xiaomi Mi A1, as that smartphone is a part of Google’s Android One project, and it comes with stock Android, but other Xiaomi phones do not have such capabilities just yet.
As most of you know, on top of Android, Xiaomi’s smartphones also ship with MIUI, Xiaomi’s very own skin, and a Google Assistant is not a part of it. Well, according to the company’s Senior VP, and his Twitter post, we may see Google Assistant on Xiaomi’s devices in the not so distant future. Mr. Xiang did not share an ETA for its arrival, but at least we know that Xiaomi is doing its best to deliver it. In his tweet, Mr. Xiang also mentioned that the Google Assistant is already available on (some) Mi TVs, though, so there’s that. It’s worth noting that Actions on Google now support 16 languages, while Google Assistant will support over 30 languages by the end of the year. Google Assistant is definitely growing, so it’s no wonder Xiaomi wants to get it working on its smartphones.
This Chinese smartphone OEM did participate in this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), unlike last year, but the company did not exactly announce anything new. Xiaomi did showcase some of its newer smartphones, like the Redmi Note 5 Pro, for example, a handset which was announced in India last month, and which will arrive to China later this month. The Redmi Note 5 Pro managed to attract a lot of attention at MWC 2018, and it will probably arrive to Spain in the near future as well, as Xiaomi officially started selling smartphones over there a couple of months ago. Xiaomi is expected to introduce two flagship smartphones in the coming months, the Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S will be announced later this month, on March 27, while the Xiaomi Mi 7 is expected to arrive in June, though its release date or timeframe have not been confirmed just yet, so take that info with a grain of salt.