Move over, Siri: China's ZTE says it created more intelligent virtual personal assistant

Chinese tech giant ZTE believes its home-grown electronic personal assistant will be more than a match for Apple's Siri, Google's Now, Microsoft's Cortana or Amazon's Echo.

The smartphone maker is so confident of its voice-control and artificial intelligence technology that it is banking on grabbing a leading share of the global market.

It also planned to aggressively rebrand its image through social media and marketing - an area other Chinese firms tended to neglect, said Lin Waiman, senior director of technology and partnership at ZTE.

"We have put a lot of work into building a smart system based on voice control and artificial intelligence. It uses chips that we developed ourselves. It is a separate ecosystem in its own right," he said at the firm's Shenzhen headquarters.

The idea of having an electronic genie as the centrepiece of a smartphone is hardly new. Apple introduced Siri - the best known electronic personal assistant - with its iPhone 4s in 2011. Voice-command features have since become a must-have for any top-market smartphone, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon putting forward their own candidates for the "smartest electronic genie of them all".