Alibaba just threw its hat into the smart glasses ring. The Chinese tech giant announced Monday it’s launching AI-powered smart glasses in China by the end of 2025. Called the Quark AI Glasses, they’re Alibaba’s first crack at wearable tech.
Here’s the deal. These glasses run on Alibaba’s Qwen large language model and its AI assistant called Quark. The Hangzhou-based company has been aggressively launching new models to compete with Western AI players like OpenAI. Now they’re taking that competition into hardware.
Smart glasses are becoming the new battleground. Tech companies think they’re the next big thing after smartphones. Alibaba’s jumping in because they want to get their Quark app, currently available only as a phone app in China, onto people’s faces.
The competition is heating up. Alibaba is going head-to-head with Meta’s smart glasses made with Ray-Ban. Plus they’ll face off against fellow Chinese company Xiaomi, which released its own AI glasses this year.
What can these glasses do? Pretty much what you’d expect from a smart wearable. Hands-free calling. Music streaming. Real-time language translation. Meeting transcription. They’ve got a built-in camera too.
But here’s where it gets interesting for Chinese users. Alibaba owns a bunch of services in China. Maps. Travel booking. Its affiliate Ant Group runs Alipay, the mobile payment service everyone uses. The glasses will tap into all of that. Users can navigate, pay with Alipay, and shop on Taobao, Alibaba’s massive e-commerce platform. All through their glasses.
Alibaba hasn’t spilled details on price or technical specs yet. That’ll come later.
The move makes sense. Alibaba dominates e-commerce and cloud services in China. They’re a major player in AI. Smart glasses could be the perfect way to tie all their services together. Instead of pulling out your phone to shop or pay, you just use your glasses.
It’s also about staying relevant. Meta is betting big on wearables as the future of computing. Apple’s rumored to be working on smart glasses. Chinese companies can’t afford to sit this one out.
The timing is smart too. AI has gotten good enough to make smart glasses actually useful. Voice recognition works. Translation is solid. Computer vision can identify objects. The tech is finally catching up to the vision.
Will people actually wear them? That’s the million-dollar question. Google Glass flopped spectacularly years ago. But the tech has improved. And in China, where mobile payments and digital services are everywhere, smart glasses might have a better shot.
Alibaba’s betting they will. By the end of 2025, we’ll find out if they’re right.
