Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced this Thursday the launch of a new artificial intelligence chatbot. The free service allows text or voice conversations and provides real-time information, the company said in a statement.
Alibaba has integrated the chat assistant into its Quark app, a platform that started as a browser but was repositioned this year as the group’s flagship consumer app with additional artificial intelligence functions including search.
Alibaba’s AI efforts have primarily focused on enterprise customers through its cloud computing services division. This Thursday’s launch represents yet another attempt to win over consumers in a market where the company has struggled to gain traction with its Tongyi AI application.
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Despite being one of the first Chinese companies to launch an AI assistant for consumers in late 2023, Tongyi has failed to gain widespread adoption. The app had 6.96 million monthly active users as of September, according to AI product tracker Aicpb.com. By comparison, ByteDance’s Doubao, the market leader in China, had 150 million monthly active users, while DeepSeek had 73.4 million and Tencent had 64.2 million.
Globally, AI assistants have been gaining traction for companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, which have incorporated them into their Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT platforms.
Based on Alibaba’s latest Qwen3 models, the AI chat assistant offers enhanced reasoning, understanding and execution capabilities, the company said.
Separately, Alibaba announced that pre-orders for its Quark AI smart glasses will begin at midnight on Friday on its Tmall e-commerce platform. The company will begin fulfilling orders from December, with the glasses costing 4,699 yuan ($659.69).
Alibaba unveiled its smart glasses in July, entering the wearable AI device market alongside companies like Meta.
