Huawei is preparing an AI Quick Bar for HarmonyOS 7 that gives its Celia assistant a permanent place in the center of the home-screen dock. The change makes the assistant accessible with one tap, rather than requiring users to open a separate app or invoke it by voice.
According to a Huawei Customer Service response reported by Huawei Central, the feature is due to start rolling out by the end of October. Availability will be phased and will vary by device model.
The revised dock is designed around Celia: two app shortcuts sit on each side of the assistant, replacing a conventional dock with four or more standard shortcuts. Huawei showed AI Quick Bar during the Mate XT 2 launch, but had not previously provided a deployment window.
Celia’s expanding system role
The Quick Bar reflects Huawei’s broader plan to make Celia a system-level assistant in HarmonyOS 7, able to handle actions that can extend across apps rather than only answer simple requests.
- Find files and photos from approximate descriptions.
- Translate webpages and documents.
- Recognize addresses, links, and codes, then suggest an appropriate action.
- Extract information and send it to the calendar.
- Generate content in the background.
- Organize information from messages and notifications.
- Control smart-home devices.
- Handle certain calls in user-configured scenarios.
Giving Celia the dock’s most prominent position also trades away a valuable shortcut slot. Huawei has not said whether users will be able to disable AI Quick Bar entirely or restore a conventional app-only dock.
For now, the feature is tied to Huawei’s HarmonyOS ecosystem in China. The company has not announced a timetable for international Huawei phones, leaving global availability of AI Quick Bar unconfirmed.
