China Big Tech firms experiment with personalised chatbots amid push to monetise generative AI technologies
- Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has featured a shop with a new kind of virtual product – a digital assistant called Duxiaoxiao
- This range of digital assistants are powered by Ernie Bot, Baidu’s AI chatbot, and are tailored to buyers’ preferences
Chinese Big Tech firms are ramping up efforts to make money from consumer-facing generative artificial intelligence (AI) services in a market where OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have no access.
With China’s annual Singles' Day shopping festival in full flow, Alibaba Group Holding’s Taobao marketplace has featured a shop with a new kind of virtual product – a digital assistant called Duxiaoxiao. This range of virtual assistants are powered by Ernie Bot, Baidu’s AI chatbot, and are tailored to buyers’ preferences. Alibaba also owns the South China Morning Post.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shop, which is just days old, has garnered more than 20,000 followers, with over 600 items sold, according to Taobao shop records.
Meanwhile, Chinese delivery services giant Meituan recently launched its generative AI service Wow, a chatbot hailed as a “community of AI friends for youngsters”, which responds to user questions with a personal touch.
Wow is an internal project built on the back of several different foundational AI models. It is still under development and in a testing phase, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified as they are not authorised to talk to the media.