Alibaba to launch AI-powered glasses creating a Chinese rival to Meta

Alibaba on Monday unveiled a pair of smart glasses powered by its artificial intelligence models, marking the Chinese firm's first foray into the product category.

The e-commerce giant said the Quark AI Glasses will be launched in China by the end of 2025 with hardware powered by the firm's Qwen large language model and its advanced AI assistant called Quark.

The Hangzhou, headquartered company is one of the leaders in China's AI space, aggressively launching new models with capabilities that compete with Western counterparts like OpenAI.

Many tech companies see wearables, specifically glasses, as the next frontier in computing alongside the smartphone. Quark, which was updated this year, is currently available as an app in China. Alibaba is stepping into the hardware game as a way to distribute the app more widely.

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.

Alibaba said its glasses will support hands-free calling, music streaming, real-time language translation, and meeting transcription. The glasses also feature a built-in camera.

Alibaba owns a range of different services in China from mapping to an online travel agent. Its affiliate company Ant Group also runs the widely-used Alipay mobile service. Alibaba said users will be able to use a navigation service via the glasses, pay with Alipay and compare prices on Taobao, its China e-commerce platform.

The firm has yet to release other details such as the price and technical specifications.