Alibaba on Thursday announced pricing for its upcoming artificial intelligence glasses and launched a new chatbot powered by its latest AI models.
The Chinese technology giant said the Quark AI Glasses will go on pre-sale on Oct. 24 on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform Tmall. The pre-sale price will start at 4,699 Chinese yuan ($659.4) but after applying various discounts, will cost 3,999 yuan.
Alibaba will begin shipping the product from December.
The Hangzhou-headquartered firm also unveiled AI Chat Assistant, a new chatbot mode within its existing Quark app.
The latest moves are part of Alibaba’s aggressive AI push this year which has seen the company release updated models and a drive to reinvigorate sales at its cloud computing business through which it sells much of this technology to businesses.
But the glasses and chatbot product highlight an increasing area of focus for Alibaba — AI that is aimed at consumers.
Alibaba’s shares closed nearly 1.7% higher in Hong Kong and its U.S.-listed stock also rose in premarket trade.
Alibaba AI glasses
Alibaba first announced the Quark AI Glasses in July. It’s the first product of its kind from the Chinese giant and the eyewear is powered by the company’s Qwen large language model and its Quark AI assistant.
The glasses support functions such as hands-free calling, music streaming and real-time language translation.
Many tech companies see wearables, specifically glasses, as the next frontier in computing, alongside the smartphone. The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s answer to Meta’s smart glasses that were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban.
The Chinese tech giant will also now compete with Chinese consumer electronics player Xiaomi who this year released its own AI glasses.
New AI assistant
Quark is Alibaba’s main consumer-facing AI app. Alibaba on Thursday unveiled a product called AI Chat Assistant, which is a new AI chatbot powered by its latest Qwen3 models.
The new mode allows users to switch to a chatbot style interface and have conversations via text or voice. Alibaba said the new feature allows “AI search and conversation” in one interface. The idea is that users can do everything they need in one application.
Alibaba said some of the functions include photo editing, “photo-based problem solving” and AI writing.
The product is Alibaba’s answer to the growing number of chatbot products out there from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to DeepSeek.
Source: CNBC