Alibaba launches AI chatbot service in renewed consumer push (www.reuters.com)

Alibaba has rolled out a free AI chatbot assistant integrated into its Quark app, marking a renewed consumer push after years of AI work focused on enterprise cloud clients. The text- and voice-enabled assistant, powered by Alibaba’s latest Qwen3 models, is billed to offer improved reasoning, understanding and execution for real-time information and services. Quark — repositioned this year from a browser into Alibaba’s flagship consumer app with enhanced AI search — is the vehicle for the company’s attempt to catch up in a market led by ByteDance and Tencent and dominated globally by products like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Technically, using Qwen3 suggests upgrades in multimodal comprehension and task execution that could tighten the integration between search, conversational interactions and e‑commerce actions across Alibaba’s ecosystem. The move follows the underperformance of Alibaba’s Tongyi consumer assistant (about 6.96M monthly users in September vs. Doubao’s 150M), highlighting adoption challenges despite competitive model tech. Alibaba also opened pre-sales for Quark AI Glasses (4,699 yuan, shipping from December), signaling a hardware-software play to create sticky consumer experiences and compete with other wearable AI efforts like Meta’s. Overall, the launch underscores intensified competition in consumer-facing AI assistants and Alibaba’s strategy to bundle advanced LLM capabilities with apps and devices to drive user engagement.