Tencent's WeChat New AI Feature Rolls Out on Xiaomi, Huawei, and Oppo

China's biggest chat app quietly opened itself to phone AI assistants, six months after blocking ByteDance for trying the same thing without asking.

Jun 5, 2026

by Damilare Odedina

Tencent, the Chinese tech giant behind WeChat, China's dominant messaging and payments app with 1.4 billion monthly users, confirmed today that selected users on Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo devices can now control WeChat through their phone's built-in AI voice assistant.

Honor, the phone brand spun off from Huawei, is the first manufacturer to have completed the integration and pushed it to users. According to Caixin Global, half of Honor's active devices already support the feature, including the Magic8, 500, and X70 series.

Rollouts for Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo are ongoing. For now, only calls and messages are supported. Payments and browsing WeChat's social feed are not yet available through voice assistants.

Why Tencent's WeChat AI approach is different from what ByteDance tried

In December 2025, ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, and phone maker ZTE launched an AI assistant called Doubao on the Nubia M153 handset. Doubao could control apps across the phone by voice, including WeChat, by simulating human screen taps using device-level permissions.

WeChat's security systems flagged this as unauthorised automated activity, and users started receiving forced logouts with error messages citing an abnormal login environment. ByteDance disabled the WeChat features within days.