Huawei kicked off its Developer Conference today, and Executive Director Richard Yu took the stage to unveil HarmonyOS 6 – Huawei’s next major launch of the in-house software.
HarmonyOS 6 brings the usual design polish, tweaks, and improvements, but the OS’ most important new feature is the new Intelligent Agent Framework. It aims to bring more human-like and natural interaction between you and HarmonyOS 6’s new personal assistant – XiaoYi.
The aim here is for the OS to intuitively understand what you want and respond depending on it, instead of relying on simple voice prompts.
XiaoYi supports scanning your entire smartphone screen to give you results, similar to Circle to Search. On stage, Huawei showed off HarmonyOS 6’s AI framework in action – you can talk to ChatExcel to handle your Excel needs, ask XiaoYi to help you with making apps for HarmonyOS 6, etc.
A neat feature of HarmonyOS 6 is Touch and Share. It works between eligible PCs and smartphones (no word yet on which those are but they could be Huawei-exclusive) and allows you to send multiple files, or connect to a game with your friends by simply tapping the phone to the computer’s screen.
The HarmonyOS 6 Developer Beta Program is now live, and developers can sign up until June 30. Devs need to complete verification with Huawei’s Developer Alliance to enroll.
The supported devices are the Huawei Mate 70 and 70 Pro, the Mate 60 and 60 Pro, the Mate X5, and the MatePad Pro 11-inch (2024) and MatePad Pro 13.2 (2025).