Honor MagicOS 8.0 announced with intent-based UI and platform-level AI

Honor announced its latest mobile operating system with MagicOS 8.0 at a dedicated event held in China today. The new version is based on Android 14 and brings a large MagicLM language model to the device with 7 billion parameters. Honor is also promoting MagicOS 8.0’s intent-based user interface (IUI) that proactively suggests services and apps based on usage patterns.

The other big new feature is called Magic Portal which uses Honor’s LLM and IUI to offer context-based connection recommendations to apps and services via a lateral swipe. Honor demoed an instance of dragging a reservation from the Messages app to the Maps app to get directions to the venue.

Magic Portal supports multimodal inputs such as text and images, and also tracks gestures and eye movement on supported Honor phones. You can tap and hold clothing images and then drag them to the side to search within shopping apps. Honor has confirmed support for the 100 most popular apps in China, but there are no details on how or if these features will be ported to other regions.

MagicOS 8.0 also brings new home screen customization options, UI speed improvements, and is expected to consume fewer resources thanks to some changes made by Honor’s software team. There’s a new “shake to block” advertising feature to fend off annoying pop-ups and system-wide parallel spaces to display two instances of the same app.