Xiaomi is developing a feature that uses artificial intelligence to automatically answer phone calls: here's how it works
How many times should you have answered an important phone call but couldn't because you were busy, perhaps in an important business meeting? Xiaomi is developing a feature, called "Inter-Finger Call", that could be very useful in situations like these.
Inter-Finger Call is nothing more than an automatic responder managed by artificial intelligence algorithms, whose potential goes far beyond the classic rejection of the call with subsequent SMS "I can not answer. I'll call you back". This feature is not official yet: it has been found inside the MIUI Lab section of a beta release of MIUI 11, the new user interface for Xiaomi smartphones that should arrive within a few weeks. It's not clear if the Inter-Finger Call will come with MIUI 11 or if it will be pushed to a future version of the Xiaomi UI. Finally, it's also not out of the question that it will be initially launched only in China and only afterwards in the rest of the world as well.
How Inter-Finger Call works
MIUI 11's Inter-Finger Call feature adds a slider to the incoming call screen. If the user can't answer it, they can activate the XiaoAI virtual assistant (currently only available in China) that answers the call for them. The caller's voice is converted into text in real time, so we can read what the caller is saying to us. XiaoAI, in the meantime, answers by converting into voice the text chosen by the user: the smartphone shows a list of predefined answers, based on what the caller has said. It is, therefore, a kind of "hybrid" solution that does not completely replace the user in the call managed by artificial intelligence. If it works well, however, it could be really useful in many occasions.
Will it arrive in Europe and USA too?
It's not known yet if Inter-Finger Call will really see the light inside MIUI 11: the feature needs to be developed very well in order to be effective. At the moment, moreover, it appears to be tied to the XiaoAI assistant, which is not installed by Xiaomi on smartphones sold outside of China. An eventual international version of Inter-Finger Call, instead, should interface with Google Assistant and this doesn't let us think that we'll be able to use this feature in Italy soon.