Alexa is coming to your phone: Huawei adds the Amazon assistant

Amazon’s Alexa is creeping into just about every facet of our digital lives and it looks like it’s making an important step with Huawei – into your smartphone.

Huawei announced the US launch of the Huawei Mate 9, it’s big-screen Android phone at CES 2017, with one of the features listed as integrated Alexa. Not only that, but the first phone to land with Amazon Alexa.

• Huawei Mate 9 review: The big-screen boss

The Huawei Mate 9 is a great phone in its own right, but’s also claiming this world’s first with an interactive Alexa app.

As the Mate 9 is an Android phone, you could arguably say that Google should be able to handle all the things that you might ask Alexa to do, but Google’s relatively slow movement on Google Assistant may have lost them this early advantage.

Huawei has confirmed that it’s not just new phones that get the app, but that it will be rolling-out to existing Mate 9 owners too.

Huawei goes on to state that: “Huawei and Amazon will collaborate to develop rich voice activated consumer experiences for mobile users,” but at this time it’s unclear of how this collaboration will develop.

We’ve asked Huawei what this means for future devices and are awaiting a response; we’re also investigating to see whether you’ll be able to get the sort of seamless hotword response from Alexa that you can from Ok Google.

We will keep you posted.