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Baidu has unveiled artificial intelligence-based smart glasses as Chinese tech giants compete with global rivals to make use of AI-integrated hardware.
Li Ying, head of Baidu's hardware brand Xiaodu, said during a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday that his smart glasses will change into “a personal assistant.”
The glasses are based on Baidu's large voice model Ernie and permit wearers to trace calories burned, ask questions on their surroundings, play music and shoot videos, the corporate said.
While China lags behind the United States in developing probably the most powerful large-scale language models, experts say Chinese tech giants could leverage the country's advanced electronics sector to develop competitive consumer hardware with integrated AI. Baidu's glasses will initially only be sold in China.
The company's entry into smart glasses comes at a time when US technology groups Meta and Snap try to dominate the market outside China. Meta has developed a line of smart glasses with Ray-Ban, one among which sells for as much as $379. They should not available on the market in China.
The launch of Baidu's smart glasses, expected to go on sale next 12 months, signals the beginning of a battle between the country's major Internet corporations to change into the leading provider of AI-integrated hardware. To date, data glasses have largely been developed by start-ups.
Xiaodu has integrated Ernie Bot into existing products, including a virtual dashboard for families to watch elderly relatives who can check with AI doctors and receive medication reminders through a tool.
Last month, TikTok owner ByteDance launched its first pair of earbuds that allow users to speak on to the corporate's Doubao chatbot without using their smartphone.
“The magic that Chinese tech corporations have all the time shown is to create compelling consumer products at competitive prices,” said Paul Triolo, partner and head of world technology policy at consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group. “This will give them a bonus over foreign corporations in relation to integrating AI into useful applications at scale.”
Baidu, which operates China's leading search engine, led the race to develop the nationwide version of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Ernie Bot – whose mobile version was recently renamed Wenxiaoyan – has since been overtaken by ByteDance's Doubao.
According to market research service Sensor Tower, Doubao is now the leading chatbot in China by way of monthly energetic users. According to Sensor Tower, it was the fifth most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li also announced a brand new AI image generator iRAG on Tuesday. Li claimed that the image generator had fewer hallucinations as a result of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a method to extend the accuracy of answers with information retrieved from external sources.
“Over the past 12 months, the largest change in AI has been the elimination of hallucinations and the usage of RAG to extend the reliability and accuracy of models,” said Baidu’s CEO.
While shares of Tencent and Alibaba have rallied this 12 months, shares of Baidu have fallen 26 percent since January after investors were disenchanted with the corporate's AI offerings and frightened about falling promoting revenue. Baidu generates nearly all of its revenue from promoting on its search engine.
