Chinese tech giant Alibaba has entered the competitive smart glasses arena with its new Quark AI eyewear, directly challenging Meta's dominance in the wearable AI accessory space. The company unveiled its Qwen AI-powered glasses in China, marking a significant move in the rapidly evolving smart glasses market.
Design and Key Features
Unlike Meta's smart glasses that feature a sunglasses-like design, Alibaba's Quark glasses maintain the appearance of regular eyewear, making them more suitable for everyday use. The glasses come in three distinct variants, all powered by the company's proprietary Qwen AI model.
Users can activate the AI assistant by saying "Hello Qwen" or through touch controls, enabling hands-free interaction throughout the day. The company emphasizes that the glasses provide "intelligent, hands-free assistance for everyday life" by combining voice and vision capabilities for real-time AI interactions.
Capabilities and Ecosystem Integration
The Quark AI glasses boast an impressive array of features that position them as serious competitors in the smart glasses market. They can perform instant price recognition, real-time translation, near-eye navigation, and generate AI-powered meeting notes. The glasses also support AI-driven search functionality for both text and images.
Additional practical features include setting reminders, functioning as a live teleprompter, and using context awareness to find nearby locations and manage schedules. What sets Alibaba's offering apart is its deep integration with the company's extensive ecosystem in China, including popular services like Alipay, Amap, Taobao, Fliggy, and music streaming platforms such as QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music.
The company claims this integration creates a "unified experience across shopping, travel, payments, music, and productivity." Furthermore, the glasses support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), opening the platform to third-party developers who can build additional applications and services.
Pricing and Technical Specifications
Alibaba is offering the Quark glasses in two main variants with distinct features and price points. The flagship S1 model is priced at ¥3,799 ($537) and is powered by the Snapdragon AR1 processor along with an unnamed co-processor. It features a swappable dual system that delivers up to 24 hours of battery life.
The S1 variant includes a dual micro-OLED display and can capture photos with a 0.6-second instant capture rate. It can record up to 3K video and offers an AI enhancement option to upscale footage to 4K quality. The more affordable G1 model costs ¥1,899 ($268) and weighs just 40 grams, though it lacks many key features including display, audio, imaging, and AI capabilities.
The launch was showcased at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen town of Tongxiang city, Zhejiang province, China on November 8, 2025, where attendees could experience the glasses firsthand at Alibaba's exhibition booth.
