Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. began sales of its first smart glasses powered by its Qwen AI models, marking a rare foray into consumer hardware.
The new Quark S1 glasses include built-in translucent displays that superimpose contextual information on the user’s view of surroundings. Equipped with cameras, bone conduction microphones and swappable batteries rated to last 24 hours, this new product aims to offer the Chinese market something along the lines of Meta Platforms Inc.’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
It marks an extension of Alibaba’s ambitious reorganisation into an AI-first business. The company made a big splash with its Qwen app release last week, consolidating its various consumer AI services into a single, upgraded program that quickly attracted more than 10 million users. Chief executive officer Eddie Wu this week said the company has seen “exceptional user retention” with the new release. Alibaba has also integrated the Qwen suite into its Quark desktop browser and is now broadening its reach with the Quark wearables lineup.
Alongside the S1, which starts at 3,799 yuan ($537), Alibaba will offer a 1,899-yuan Quark G1 model that eschews the micro-OLED displays. The S1 is available to buy immediately from Alibaba’s Tmall, JD.com, ByteDance Ltd.’s Douyin and more than 600 stores across 82 cities in China. International versions will come next year, with some available via platforms like AliExpress, according to a spokesperson from Alibaba’s Quark unit.
Smart glasses, particularly ones touting artificial intelligence capabilities like transcription, have proliferated in China over the past year. Many so far have come from startups like Even Realities, which aim at augmenting conventional glasses rather than reinventing them. Market tracker IDC saw 1.6 million shipments of smart glasses in China in the year to September, with Xiaomi Corp. claiming roughly a third. That figure rises to 2 million units once glasses with built-in displays are included.
More recently, Meta’s $799 Ray-Ban Display pair showed a more ambitious approach to the category, with integrated screens and a separate wrist band for gesture controls. Meta’s most advanced model is bulkier, heavier and pricier than usual, but it has drawn the contours of a promising path for development.
Alibaba integrates many of its ecosystem strengths with the new Quark hardware, including the Taobao marketplace, travel-booking platform Fliggy and payments via Alipay. The company also partners with Hangzhou neighbor NetEase Inc. and Shenzhen’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. by providing their music services, NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music.
By Luz Ding and Vlad Savov
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