Alibaba announced plans to release a pair of smart glasses powered by its AI models. The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s first foray into the smart glasses product category.<\/p>\n
Alibaba<\/p>\n
Alibaba<\/a> on Thursday announced pricing for its upcoming artificial intelligence glasses and launched a new chatbot powered by its latest AI models.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Alibaba will begin shipping the product from December.<\/p>\n The Hangzhou-headquartered firm also unveiled AI Chat Assistant, a new chatbot mode within its existing Quark app.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> through which it sells much of this technology to businesses.<\/p>\n But the glasses and chatbot product highlight an increasing area of focus for Alibaba \u2014 AI that is aimed at consumers.<\/p>\n Alibaba’s shares closed nearly 1.7% higher in Hong Kong and its U.S.-listed stock also rose in premarket trade.<\/p>\n Alibaba AI glasses<\/p>\n Alibaba first announced the Quark AI Glasses in July<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n The glasses support functions such as hands-free calling, music streaming and real-time language translation.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Meta’s smart glasses<\/a>\u00a0that were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Chinese tech giant will also now compete with Chinese consumer electronics player\u00a0Xiaomi<\/a>\u00a0who this year\u00a0released its own AI glasses<\/a>.<\/p>\n