Prior to developing Xiaoyi, Huawei was reliant on third-party voice assistants including Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. The company's first smart speaker, the AI Cube, relied on Alexa. Huawei has been building on its own voice assistant in recent months. Its newest device, the AI Speaker, uses Xiaoyi, as does its latest line of smartphones. Xiaoyi currently only supports Chinese but Huawei has ambitions to take it outside of its home country's border.

Getting a share of the voice assistant market in the United States is probably out of the realm of possibility for Huawei, but it does have an opportunity to compete internationally. The market is fragmented, with Google assistant owning just over half the shares, Apple maintaining 31 percent and Chinese firm Baidu holding 17 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. Amazon's Alexa, a popular AI in the US, barely registers globally because it isn't the primary voice assistant on a smartphone. Huawei may be able to use its popular handsets to help gain hold of some of the international market for AI assistants.