Bank of China International: It is expected that next year, AI mobile assistants will begin to develop a wide range of developers to invest in and upgrade functional hardware related to end-side AI in advance

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Bank of China International released a research report saying that next year will be the year AI mobile assistants will begin to be widely developed, and the market will release products with AI mobile assistant functions one after another in the next few quarters. The bank believes that the release of Doubao Mobile Assistant will significantly strengthen the FOMO mentality of mobile phone manufacturers, thereby leading to early investment and upgrades of functional hardware related to AI on the other side, such as SoC, storage, battery life, heat dissipation, and sensors.

According to the report, on December 1, ByteDance and ZTE Mobile released an engineering prototype equipped with a preview version of Doubao Mobile Assistant. Its core selling point is the ability to automate AI agents across applications through voice commands. Innovative features such as shopping price comparison and itinerary planning presented in the Doubao mobile phone commercial video accurately hit consumers' expectations of AI phones and brought about a high level of social media conversation.

However, immediately after the product was released, it encountered usage restrictions on multiple software platforms. The first batch of user feedback triggered an abnormal login environment and blocked it when using WeChat; several banking apps and Alibaba apps identified inhumane work risks, refused to execute sensitive instructions such as payments and verification codes, or directly prompted “device abnormalities.” Faced with widespread industry boycotts and usage restrictions, the Doubao team was forced to urgently shut down the ability to work on WeChat and financial apps on December 3 and 5, and restricted the use of AI assistants in usage scenarios such as game play on behalf of others and click incentive ads.

According to Bank of China International, senior experts from the mobile phone smart assistant industry were invited to participate in the discussion and agreed that mobile AI assistants are gradually moving towards an inflection point of application. The design of the basic underlying technology stack is quite mature, and the main difficulties currently faced are due more to the friction brought about by the different interests of internet service providers, mobile phone hardware manufacturers, and regulators.