Infinix has announced that it will be launching its mid-range devices, the Note 50 series in Indonesia on 3 March. Going by the Transsion owned brand’s track record, the phone could also soon make their way into other global markets including India. While there isn’t a lot of information about the incoming devices, a new report by GSMarena suggests that Infinix may be looking to make Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek more acccessible with the Note 50 series.
The teaser video of Note 50 series already states that the phone will come with Infinix AI but it doesn’t dive into detail as to what it will exactly mean. However, the GSMArena report states that Infinix will add DeepSeek R1 into its Folax voice assistant. Infinix’s in-house voice assistant is said to better handle searches and voice commands better and faster with the DeepSeek R1 integration.
What is DeepSeek R1? Why Infinix may be planning to integrate it?
For the unaware, DeepSeek R1 is the Chinese company’s sole reasoning model and competes with the likes of OpenAI o3 Mini and Grok reasoning. Unlike the traditional pre-trained models like GPT-4o or Gemini 2.0, reasoning models are meant to mimic human like thinking and AI giants claim that they are useful for complex tasks like coding, scientific reasoning and multi-step planning for AI agents.
Notably, DeepSeek R1 remains completely free and open source which means it has a huge potential to used by different smartphone makers. While most Android phones – especially the ones from Google and Samsung – rely on Google’s Gemini to provide AI features, Apple has deployed ChatGPT in Siri to make it better at handling complex queries. With the integration of DeepSeek R1 in Folax, Infinix may just become the first smartphone maker to implement the AI chatbot in a smartphone.
The Folax voice assistant currently deploys Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI APIs to leverage the capabilities of GPT-3.5 language model. I tried this assistant in a couple of Infinix phones last year and while having a novelty factor it failed to impress me with its handling of complex queries.
That being said, the GSMArena report states that Infinix will make an official annoucement on the DeepSeek integration 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.
