China’s AI wearables market is already booming
China’s AI device market is already booming, and the country’s hardware expertise could give it an advantage in the high-tech race against the United States.
01.AI CEO and president of Sinovation Ventures, Dr. “The advantage comes from the fundamental root of China being a manufacturing country,” Kai-Fu Lee told CNBC. “Today, competition is in software, models, agents and applications. But soon competition will shift to devices as well.”
Meta It has sold millions of its smart glasses since the features were introduced in 2023, and the Chinese have caught up, with more than 70 Chinese companies creating competing products in the space.
Glasses from companies like inmo And Rokid sold worldwide. Xiaomi And Alibaba’s‘s are found only in China and are embedded in the tech giants’ own artificial intelligence.
DingTalk, Alibaba’s messaging platform for the workplace, this year launched a credit card-sized AI device for taking notes at work.
DingTalk A1 can record, transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations from up to 8 meters (26 feet) away, which is approximately the length of a large meeting room.
The device looks like this: Applause Noteavailable in the USA
Device experiments in China range from the practical to the unusual.
Chinese startup Le Le Gaoshang Education Technology has launched a “Mother Language Star” branded translation gadget aimed at helping Chinese parents with limited English skills teach English to their own children.
The mechanism, which wraps around the back of the user’s neck like a travel neck pillow and descends towards the chest, has a type of mouthpiece unit that passes over the mouth and silences the user’s own voice.
The unit is built with Tencent and iFlyTek AI and is billed as a way to turn an English-speaking Chinese parent into a “laowai,” or foreigner. It retails for $420.
Having so many hardware touchpoints helps with adoption and helps people get used to the technology. Analysts say it’s also a boost that companies collect as much data as their war chests compared to other countries.
“When you hear people outside of China still talking about the future of the AI device, the market here is already flooded with AI devices,” technology consultant Tom van Dillen of Greenkern said in his office in Beijing. “This recreates that feedback loop to make the AI even better.”
But superiority in hardware is far from a guarantee of winning the AI race, especially if China’s AI fails to appeal to global customers due to privacy or other issues or falls far behind its counterparts in the United States or elsewhere.
“You really have to be that Apple iPhone to get most of the rewards,” Lee cautioned, referencing the late entrepreneur Steve Jobs’ invention seen as one of the most transformative consumer products ever. “I think the advantage in China of producing the Apple iPhone for the age of AI is that talent is available, such as engineers and entrepreneurs. But it will still be a race.”
