Yahoo Finance Baidu rebrands Ernie Bot as Wenxiaoyan in China to stand out from AI rivals
Baidu on Wednesday announced a rebranding of its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) app Ernie Bot, as the Chinese technology giant tries to distinguish itself in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.
The Chinese renaming of Ernie Bot to "Wenxiaoyan" from "Wenxin Yiyan" reflects the tool's positioning as a "new search" assistant, according to Xue Su, vice-president and head of AI innovation business at Baidu.
"With new technologies, we are able to make search smarter and more convenient," Xue said at a launch event in Beijing. While the company is exploring commercialisation opportunities for the service, the focus is on user value first, he added.
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Baidu, operator of China's most widely used search engine, is leveraging its dominant position in the internet search market to gain an edge in the fast-growing local AI sector, where start-ups and Big Tech companies alike are fighting for customers.
Baidu's Ernie Bot app can generate AI images from text prompts. Photo: imon Song alt=Baidu's Ernie Bot app can generate AI images from text prompts. Photo: imon Song>
The Wenxiaoyan app, available for download from local Android and iOS app stores, allows users to search for internet content based on text, speech or images. The tool also features a range of AI functions, such as text-to-image generation, as well as customised agents made by third-party developers for specific tasks.
More than 900,000 customised agents have been created so far, including ones that help users memorise English words, provide emotional support to users, or draw images in the style of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
Before the rebranding as Wenxiaoyan, Ernie Bot was the second-most popular AI app in China last month, trailing only ByteDance's Doubao, according to Chinese AI product rankings website aicpb.com. To attract new users, Baidu is giving free access to its most advanced AI model, Ernie 4.0 Turbo, through Wenxiaoyan this month.
Similar to its major competitors, Baidu has been integrating its AI capabilities into a range of products and services. As part of a recent update, users of the Baidu search engine receive an AI-generated summary of search results, saving them time from having to scroll through a list of links. In the US, Google and Microsoft have also launched similar functions based on their respective AI models.
Robin Li Yanhong, founder and CEO of Baidu, said in a recent post-earnings call that around 18 per cent of the company's online search results were generated by AI, and he expected that number to grow in the following months.
Other Baidu products that have received AI upgrades include online document sharing service Wenku, which was China's most popular AI service in May, according to aicpb.com. Wenku uses AI to help users create and edit presentation slides.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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