The Honor 400 Series Will Bring a New AI Technology From Google

The next duo of smartphones in Honor’s roster aren’t too far off. They make up the Honor 400 series, which takes up a comfortable spot in the upper-midrange tier of the market (particularly the Pro model). It’s 2025, though, so it’s no surprise that the Chinese OEM doesn’t hesitate to advertise the AI features that it plans to bring.

Beyond the “200MP AI camera” that the Honor 400 Pro is going to come with, there’s another AI feature that Honor has been working on, using AI technology made by Google. In this case, you’ll be able to magically turn a still image into a five-second video clip, using the new AI Image to Video feature.

Honor’s Upcoming Devices Bring a New AI Image to Video Feature to Its Phones

The world is leaning very heavily towards AI technologies (even though I think it might be leaning a bit too much). If you’re a smartphone OEM and you don’t embrace the AI revolution, you’ll likely find yourself left behind by the competition. Needless to say, that means companies are pushing to include AI in more creative ways, and forcing the letters into every bit of marketing material that they have.

Honor is no different from the rest. The Honor 400 series will arrive on the scene on May 22nd, and despite the marketing image for the launch having less than 15 words, “AI” is mentioned three times. That’s why the company is very excited to mention the new feature that will be arriving on the upcoming phones. It’s called AI Image to Video, which is pretty self-explanatory. It’ll be able to turn a still image into a five-second video clip.

Honor’s New Feature Brings Life to Famous Paintings

Honor demonstrated this with famous pieces of art, including:

• Claude Monet: Impression, Sunrise
• Vincent Van Gogh: Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887)
• Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (above)

Below is Van Gogh’s self-portrait brought to life, with slight movement in the head, mouth, and eyes.

And finally, here is Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, made a lot more dynamic. This is perhaps my favorite of the set since I feel that the animated version has a lot more “value” to it.

Honor Leveraged Google’s AI-Powered Veo Model to Achieve This

This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has ever been done. I remember a few years ago, there were social media filters that people were using to animate old photos. However, they were essentially limited to adding a few movements to the head and eyes, at least as far as I recall. This feature leverages a more powerful model for video generation, and that’s Google Veo.

While it isn’t quite like this was made in direct collaboration with Google, it uses Google’s tech to ensure that the generated videos move realistically and do precisely what the users ask them to. The videos can be generated in either 16:9 or 9:16 aspect ratios.

Google isn’t playing around in the AI space, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering that it has been developing tech in that space for ages. Here are some of the AI models the company has under its belt.