Categories: Travel

Alibaba upgrades Qwen app to order meals, ebook journey

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BEIJING, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab on Thursday launched important upgrades to its Qwen synthetic intelligence app, saying it might now execute duties corresponding to order meals supply and make journey bookings because it extra aggressively pushes into consumer-facing AI.

The new options, now in public testing in China, allow customers to finish such duties fully throughout the AI chat interface, with out switching between purposes.

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The improve comes two months after Alibaba’s main improve on the Qwen App as a part of a strategic pivot into consumer-facing AI, an space the place it had beforehand lagged home rivals ByteDance and Tencent whereas focusing totally on enterprise AI providers by way of its cloud enterprise.

“What we are launching today represents a shift from models that understand to systems that act—deeply connected to real-world services,” mentioned Wu Jia, Vice President of Alibaba Group.

AI brokers are rising in recognition worldwide as firms search to make use of AI to help real-world duties. Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab acquired startup Manus final month to enhance its AI techniques that may full multi-step duties, whereas OpenAI has rolled out its “Operator” agent that may ebook eating places and fill out kinds on behalf of customers.

The improve integrates core Alibaba ecosystem providers together with e-commerce platform Taobao, instantaneous commerce, fee system Alipay, journey service Fliggy and mapping platform Amap right into a unified AI interface.

By integrating Alipay with the Qwen app, as an example, customers can authorise and full transactions with out leaving the dialog. The AI fee function at the moment helps instantaneous commerce orders and can increase to extra providers over time, Alibaba mentioned.

The firm additionally unveiled a “Task Assistant” function in invite-only beta that may make actual cellphone calls to eating places, course of as much as 100 paperwork concurrently and plan multi-stop journey itineraries.

Since its public beta launch on November 17, Qwen App has surpassed 100 million month-to-month energetic customers inside two months, in accordance with the assertion.

Powered by Alibaba’s Qwen3 basis mannequin, the growth displays broader competitors in China’s AI sector, the place firms are racing to translate superior language fashions into sensible client purposes.

Reporting by Liam Mo and Brenda Goh; Editing by Stephen Coates

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Brenda Goh is Reuters’ Shanghai bureau chief and oversees protection of corporates in China. Brenda joined Reuters as a trainee in London in 2010 and has reported tales from over a dozen international locations.


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