A First Look at Zhixiaobao App: Can It Become Your AI Life Companion?

Note: The article was first published on TechNode China written by Steven Lee and translated by Zinan Zhang.

At the 2024 INCLUSION in Shanghai, Ant Group unveiled its independent AI app, Zhixiaobao. Developed based on Ant’s Bailing large language model, this new AI lifestyle assistant is integrated with Alipay, offering quick services like booking tickets, ordering food, accessing public transit codes, and finding nearby activities through conversational interactions.

The app’s introduction graphic highlights its slogan, “Your AI Life Companion.” But does it live up to that promise? Here are our ideas.

Features and User Experience

Zhixiaobao’s user interface adopts Alipay’s signature blue theme but with a lighter tone. The interface is simple, featuring a standard chat window layout. The main menu is divided into three sections: “Current,” “Chat,” and “Intelligent Agents.”

The “Current” section displays cards with immediate needs like weather, package status, food pickup numbers, or ride-hailing updates. The “Intelligent Agents” section contains various AI assistants across domains such as airlines, cultural guides, nutritionists, fitness coaches, relationship experts, and personality tests. Over time, the number of these assistants is expected to increase. During the test, this section primarily showed weather and package information, and tapping on a card launched the related mini-program service.

In some situations where the AI reads content (e.g., 5-minute news summaries), users can choose between male and female voices.

At present, Zhixiaobao only supports Alipay login, and it prompts users to enable service shortcuts. If enabled, the platform will share personal and order information with third-party services as necessary.

On the left side of the input bar, there’s a “Quick Commands” button, which includes frequently used commands like weather updates, news, monthly expenses, and finding shared bikes. For instance, when we selected “Help me find a nearby bike,” the service provider was HelloBike. You can scan a code to ride the bike directly from the chat window or click the service card arrow to access the corresponding Alipay mini-program for further actions.

We asked Zhixiaobao a few questions about the weather and Black Myth: Wukong, and they provided fairly satisfactory responses. Some of the solutions offered by the AI agents also met expectations.

It’s worth noting that Zhixiaobao is described as an “AI life assistant” initially, which means it primarily focuses on providing practical, everyday services. However, features that TechNode typically tests in an AI tool, such as multimodal capabilities like text-to-image generation, are beyond Zhixiaobao’s capabilities.

Summarize

Zhixiaobao, as an AI life assistant product that operates independently of the main Alipay app (though it can also be accessed within Alipay), has indeed achieved the goal of “providing certain life services” at this stage. In the same chat window, it can read the news for you, remind you of the weather, help you book a ride with one click, recommend great hotpot places, and even plan a night CityWalk route for you.

However, the quick services Zhixiaobao offers are currently all part of Alibaba’s ecosystem. You won’t find services from Tencent-related companies (for example, you can’t track JD.com deliveries). The reasons behind this “invisible wall” are well understood by everyone. Therefore, Zhixiaobao has yet to achieve the status of a truly all-in-one AI life assistant.

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