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Baidu has unveiled artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses as Chinese tech groups race with global rivals to take advantage of AI-enabled hardware.
Li Ying, head of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, said during a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday that its smart glasses will “become a personal assistant”.
The glasses run on Baidu’s large language model Ernie and will enable wearers to track calorie consumption, ask questions about their surroundings, play music and shoot videos, the company said.
While China lags behind the U.S. in developing the most powerful major language models, experts say Chinese tech groups could take advantage of the country’s sophisticated electronics sector to develop competitive consumer hardware integrated with AI. Baidu’s glasses will initially be sold only in China.
The company’s entry into smart glasses comes as US tech groups Meta and Snap are rushing to dominate the market outside the chain. Meta has teamed up with Ray-Ban on a series of smart glasses, which retail for $379 a pair. They are not available for sale in China.
The launch of Baidu’s smart glasses, which are expected to go on sale next year, signals the start of a battle between the country’s major internet groups to become the leading provider of AI-enabled hardware. Earlier, smart glasses were largely launched by startups.
Xiaodu has embedded Ernie Bot into existing products, including a virtual dashboard for families to monitor elderly relatives, who can talk to AI doctors and prescribe medication through a device. can receive reminders for
Last month, TikTok owner ByteDance launched its first pair of earbuds, which allow users to talk directly to the company’s Doubao chatbot without using their smartphone.
“The magic that Chinese technology companies have consistently shown is coming up with consumer products at competitive prices,” said Paul Triolo, partner and global tech policy lead at consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group. “This will give them an edge over foreign companies in integrating AI into large-scale useful applications.”
Baidu, which runs China’s dominant search engine, was the frontrunner to develop a domestic version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Ernie Bot — whose mobile version was recently rebranded as Wenxiaoyan — has since overtaken ByteDance’s Doubao.
According to market intelligence service Sensor Tower, Dubao is now the leading chatbot in China as measured by monthly active users. Sensor Tower said it was the fifth most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder and chief executive, also announced an update to the company’s AI image generation through its new “iRAG” tech on Tuesday. Lee claimed that image-generating technology resulted in fewer hallucinations as a result of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique for increasing the accuracy of responses with information from external sources.
“Over the past year, the biggest change in AI has been the elimination of illusions, increasing the reliability and accuracy of models using RAG,” said Baidu’s chief executive.
While Tencent and Alibaba’s stocks have rallied this year, Baidu’s share price has fallen 26 percent since January as investors fretted over its AI offerings and worried about declining advertising revenue. . Baidu generates the bulk of its sales from advertising on its search engine.
This article has been edited to reflect that Baidu released an update to its image processing technology.
