Infinix has announced that it will launch its mid-range Note 50 series, in Indonesia on 3 March. If the Transsion-owned brand’s track record is anything to go by, the phone could soon be making its way to other global markets, including India. While there isn’t much information about the upcoming devices, a new report from GSMArena suggests that Infinix could be looking to make Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek more accessible with the Note 50 series.
The teaser video for the Note 50 series already states that the phone will come with Infinix AI, but it doesn’t go into detail about what exactly that means. However, the GSMArena report states that Infinix will be adding DeepSeek R1 to its Folax voice assistant. Infinix’s in-house voice assistant is said to handle searches and voice commands better and faster with the integration of DeepSeek R1.
What is DeepSeek R1? Why Infinix may be planning to integrate it?
For the uninitiated, DeepSeek R1 is the Chinese company’s only reasoning model and competes with the likes of OpenAI o3 Mini and Grok reasoning. Unlike traditional pre-trained models such as GPT-4o or Gemini 2.0, reasoning models are designed to mimic human-like thinking and the AI giants claim they are useful for complex tasks such as coding, scientific reasoning and multi-step planning for AI agents.
Notably, DeepSeek R1 remains completely free and open source, which means it has huge potential to be used by different smartphone manufacturers. While most Android phones – especially those from Google and Samsung – rely on Google’s Gemini to provide AI capabilities, Apple has used ChatGPT in Siri to make it better at handling complex queries. With the integration of DeepSeek R1 in Folax, Infinix could become the first smartphone maker to implement the AI chatbot in a smartphone.
The Folax voice assistant currently uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI APIs to leverage the capabilities of the GPT-3.5 language model. I tried the assistant in a couple of Infinix phones last year, and while it had a novelty factor, it failed to impress me with its handling of complex queries.
Nevertheless, the GSMArena report states that Infinix will make an official announcement on the integration of DeepSeek with the Note 50 series on 26 February.
We have reached out to Infinix and will update this story with their response if and when they provide one.
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