Honor debuts AI phone features that could save your eyesight and embarrassment

Every phone company under the sun is some way into a bit of a scramble to get AI features live on their devices right now, with varying degrees of both progress and success.

A tip of the hat, then, to Honor, which just announced a couple of interesting AI-powered features it's adding to its phones soon which actually sound potentially useful, rather than just like simple little tools you'll probably never use.

The first is called AI Defocus Eye Protection, and it's all designed to help ensure that using your phone a whole bunch doesn't turn out terribly for your eyesight. 

It uses an AI-powered bit of software to detect your eyes and mimic the effects that defocus or long-sighted glasses would have by helping your eyes to defocus more easily. The science behind that is pretty complicated, but it could well be a genuinely meaningful addition for those with bad myopia.

The second feature is AI Deepfake Detection, and it's basically a trained model that can look at who you're calling on a video call and work out if there's a chance you're being deepfaked. After all, with these video tools getting more and more sophisticated, there are plenty of people out there who might struggle to detect a fake on their own.

What isn't clear is how AI Deepfake Detection would work with various apps, or whether it might only work on certain platforms that Honor is able to interface with more easily. 

In both features' cases, there's also no actual timeline yet for when they might be added to phones, or indeed a list of phones that will get them (although it's a safe assumption that only more recently launched handsets will be powerful enough).

Still, it's genuinely impressive to see Honor announcing some features that aren't just direct clones of other phone companies' successful programmes - even Apple looks guilty of that. Its new suite of AI features in the next version of iOS will feature, for example, a pretty direct clone of Google's Magic Eraser tool for fixing up photos, among others. 

We'll have to wait for more from Honor in terms of a timeline or further AI features that it's working on, but this looks a solid start.