Alibaba starts selling Quark AI glasses in China, enters global wearables race

[SHANGHAI] Alibaba released on Thursday (Nov 27) its new Quark artificial intelligence (AI) glasses in China, heralding the Chinese tech company’s efforts to break into the AI wearables market dominated by Meta globally.

Prices will start from 1,899 yuan (S$347.84) for the headset that will be powered by Alibaba’s Qwen AI model and app. Unlike other headsets made by the likes of Meta, the Quark glasses look like regular eyewear, with a black plastic frame.

Alibaba said the glasses would be deeply integrated with its apps such as payment app Alipay and its shopping site Taobao, with users able to use it for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.

The company is making an aggressive push into the consumer AI market after having historically lagged rivals. Earlier this month it launched a major upgrade to its AI chatbot.

The race to find new forms of devices for entertainment and computing, underpinned by AI, has fuelled a battle among the biggest technology companies. Instagram-owner Meta overwhelmingly dominates the VR headset industry with about an 80 per cent market share.

Apple sells its Vision Pro headset while Samsung Electronics released its Galaxy XR extended reality headset in October that uses AI features from Alphabet’s Google.

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Other Chinese tech companies have also launched similar AI-powered glasses. Xiaomi launched a product in June, while Baidu already has a similar product being sold. REUTERS