Lenovo and Motorola are releasing their own on-device AI assistant
If the world didn’t already have one too many digital assistants, Lenovo is adding another to the pile. On Tuesday evening, the company announced Qira, cross-device AI for its own computers and Motorola smartphones. Scheduled to arrive later this quarter, it will live at the system level of Lenovo devices. Users will not need to open or switch to the wizard. Instead, “it’s always there,” Lenovo says.
Of course, you can ignore Qira and it will remain silent if you don’t need the software to do anything for you. Occasionally, Lenovo says Qira will surface proactive suggestions, and for frequent users, the company promises a machine learning system that will develop a “living model” of your world, “including context, continuity, and personal patterns over time.” In practice, this means Qira can draft emails for you, transcribe and translate meetings, and provide summaries of things you may have missed. You know, all the usual stuff that every company offers with their built-in assistants.
From a privacy perspective, Lenovo says Qira uses a hybrid architecture that “prioritizes” processing on the device and will not collect customer data without user permission. “Every aspect of the Lenovo Qira experience is designed to be secure, ethical and responsible. » I asked Lenovo how Qira would interact with Copilot and Gemini on the company’s PCs and Motorola smartphones, and whether the new assistant would add to the processing load on those devices, but the company has yet to respond to my email. I will update this article as soon as I have a response.
On paper, creating a dedicated AI assistant for the company’s devices is a good idea, I’m sure Lenovo executives agreed it was a good idea, but when many people don’t even use Copilot, it feels like a misreading of what Lenovo users want. In April, report of Newcomer suggests that Copilot had remained stable at around 20 million weekly users in 2024. In contrast, during the same period, ChatGPT had grown to 400 million weekly users, and by the end of 2025, 800 million people were using OpenAI’s chatbot every week.
