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Baidu has unveiled smart glasses powered by artificial intelligence, as a group of Chinese technology companies compete with global rivals to leverage AI-integrated hardware.
Li Ying, head of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, said at a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday that the company’s smart glasses will “become your personal assistant.”
The glasses run on Baidu’s large-scale language model “Ernie” and allow wearers to track calorie consumption, ask questions about their environment, play music and record videos. said the company.
China lags behind the United States in developing the most powerful large-scale language models, but experts say Chinese technology groups are leveraging the country’s advanced electronics sector to develop AI-integrated competitive advantages. The company says it may develop some consumer hardware. Baidu glasses will initially be sold only in China.
The company’s move into smart glasses comes as US tech groups Meta and Snap are rushing to dominate markets outside China. Meta has partnered with Ray-Ban on a series of smart glasses, with pairs selling for up to $379. Not sold in China.
The launch of Baidu’s smart glasses, scheduled to go on sale next year, signals the beginning of a battle between the country’s major internet groups to be the leading provider of AI-integrated hardware. Until now, smart glasses were mainly contracted out by start-ups.
Xiaodu has embedded Ernie Bot into its existing products, including a virtual dashboard for families to help monitor elderly relatives, talk to an AI doctor, and receive medication reminders through their devices.
Last month, TikTok owner ByteDance launched the first earphones that let users talk directly to its Doubao chatbot without using a smartphone.
“The magic that Chinese technology companies have consistently shown is creating compelling consumer products at competitive price points,” said Albright Stonebridge Group Partner and Global Technology Consultant. policy leader Paul Triolo said. “This will give us an advantage over foreign companies in integrating AI into useful applications at scale.”
Baidu, China’s leading search engine, was leading the race to develop a local version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Erniebot (the mobile version was recently rebranded as Wen Xiaoyan) has since been replaced by ByteDance’s Doubao.
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According to market intelligence service Sensor Tower, Doubao is now the leading chatbot in China, as measured by monthly active users. According to Sensor Tower, it was the fifth most downloaded AI app in the world from January to August, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, also announced a new AI image generation tool iRAG on Tuesday. Li claimed that image generators now produce fewer hallucinations as a result of search augmentation generation (RAG), a technology that improves the accuracy of responses with information obtained from external sources.
“The biggest change in AI over the past year is using RAG to make our models more reliable and accurate, eliminating illusions,” said Baidu’s CEO.
While Tencent and Alibaba’s shares have risen this year, Baidu’s stock has fallen 26% since January as investors were underwhelmed by the company’s AI products and worried about falling advertising revenue. Baidu derives most of its revenue from advertising on search engines.
