WeChat begins testing Xiaowei as Tencent eyes a Q3 AI rollout
WeChat is the rare app that already does almost everything. Chinese users message, pay, book, shop, and summon a taxi without ever leaving it, which is exactly what makes Tencent’s next move interesting: rather than build a separate chatbot and fight for downloads, it is putting an AI assistant on top of the app a billion people already open every day. Tencent has begun testing that assistant, named Xiaowei, with a small group of users.
According to a statement from WeChat, the tool lets people interact by text or voice and complete tasks by tapping into the app’s vast library of mini-programs, the lightweight apps that run inside WeChat.
In practice Xiaowei is meant to be a command layer: ask it to start a call, draft a message, or navigate to a service, and it does the menu-digging for you. It draws mainly on Weixin’s own large language model, turning...
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