OPPO's Phone AI Now Guesses What You Want Before You Type
It nearly doubled how often people tapped a suggestion instead of typing.
When you open an AI assistant on your phone, it often shows a few suggested questions — things like "set an alarm" or "what's the weather?" — before you've said anything. OPPO, the phone maker behind brands like OnePlus, rebuilt how its Xiaobu Assistant picks those suggestions. The company published the details this week, and the system is already live for more than 150 million people who use it every month.
The tricky part isn't coming up with questions. It's guessing the RIGHT ones with zero input from you, and doing it in less than 180 milliseconds — roughly the time it takes to blink twice. Think of a waiter who slides a menu across the table the second you sit down, hoping it matches your mood. The harder problem is learning from feedback: the system quietly proposes many options, but only a few ever reach your screen, so OPPO can't tell whether you ignored a suggestion or simply never saw it. Their fix was to weight the feedback by how active each user is and by how highly the assistant ranked each suggestion.
The results are modest in absolute terms but striking in relative ones. Tapping on a suggestion rose from 0.95% to 1.61% of the time — a 69% improvement — and users were shown 18% more suggestions under the same conditions. OPPO also set up a rolling update so the model refreshes with recent behavior instead of going stale.
So what? Suggested questions are the training wheels of AI. They save typing, and they help people who don't know what an assistant can even do. The catch: even after this jump, fewer than two taps happen per hundred suggestions. Most people still ignore them. And getting better at predicting you means paying closer attention to what you tap — a trade-off worth knowing about.
- OPPO's phone assistant now offers smarter starter questions the instant you open it, so you can tap instead of type.
- Taps nearly doubled in testing — from 0.95% to 1.61% — and the whole thing runs in under 180 milliseconds for 150 million monthly users.
- The catch: even improved, fewer than 2 in 100 suggestions get tapped, so most people still scroll past them.
Why It Matters
Fewer taps and faster answers on your phone — and the same trick is coming to every AI assistant you use.