Smartisan bet its flagship launch on a voice demo that failed live, on stage, repeatedly

Smartisan, the Chinese phone maker founded by outspoken entrepreneur Luo Yonghao, unveiled its TNT (Touch N' Talk) workstation on 15 May 2018 at Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium — a 27-inch touchscreen display meant to replace a PC, controlled by holding a button and speaking commands into spreadsheets and slides. It launched alongside the Smartisan R1 phone at 9,999 yuan for the display unit, with a 14,999-yuan all-in-one version announced but never priced or shipped.

The centerpiece of the launch was a live demo of the Touch N' Talk feature: hold a cell in a spreadsheet, say a number, and it fills in. On stage in front of a live audience and livestream, the feature repeatedly failed to correctly recognize the numbers Luo was dictating, forcing him to retry the same demo multiple times as the audience watched. Clips of the failed demo spread across Chinese social media within hours.

Pre-orders for the display unit opened after the event but stayed thin. By 16 July 2018, just two months later, Smartisan quietly pulled the TNT workstation from pre-sale on its own website, citing insufficient orders. The product never entered mass production; the all-in-one version was never released at all.

The TNT software lived on only as a feature bolted onto later Smartisan phones, connected to an external monitor — a much smaller ambition than the standalone workstation the company had staked its highest-profile launch of the year on. Smartisan itself ran into a cash crunch later in 2018 and was acquired piecemeal by ByteDance in 2019.