Alibaba has released a new AI chatbot inside its Quark app, stepping up its push into the consumer AI market led by ByteDance and Tencent.
Quark, once just a browser, now serves as Alibaba’s main consumer platform with AI-driven search and chat features. The new assistant is free to use and supports both text and voice conversations, giving users real-time information and services. It runs on Alibaba’s latest Qwen3 language models, which the company says improve reasoning, understanding, and task execution.
Alibaba has focused most of its AI work on businesses through Alibaba Cloud, but it has struggled to win over consumers. Its earlier app, Tongyi, launched in 2023, drew only about 7 million users in September—far behind ByteDance’s Doubao (150 million) and Tencent’s (64 million).
With the new Quark chatbot, Alibaba aims to bring its AI technology directly to everyday users.
