"Hello. Do you have a table for five at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow?"
A woman called a restaurant. She asked additional questions such as whether a private room could be reserved and whether there were menu items suitable for a child, gave the booker's phone number, and added, "I will check back with the customer. Thank you. I was the "Qwen" AI assistant."
This is a function of Alibaba's newly released artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app Qwen (Chinese name Qianwen), the Chinese big tech giant that has taken on OpenAI's ChatGPT head-on. Until hearing "I was an AI assistant," the speed of speech, word choice, and tone were all so natural that it was hard to realize it was AI.
If you type into the Qwen app, "Book a table for five at Restaurant A at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. It would be nice if a private room is available, and a child will be coming too," the AI searches for the restaurant in the map app linked with Qwen and calls the phone number shown to talk with a restaurant staffer. Going beyond indirect help for users through text or voice conversations like ordinary AI chatbot apps, it directly solves the services users need.
Aiming to be an "AI assistant" beyond a chatbot, Qwen was developed based on Alibaba's own open-source AI model. Earlier, on Nov. 17, 2025, Alibaba officially announced the Qwen project and unveiled the open beta version of the Qwen app. The way to use it is no different from other AI chatbot apps like ChatGPT. You give commands in text or voice in the chat window. You can also upload up to 100 files of various formats at once. You can check which materials the AI referenced during task execution.
Alibaba Vice President Wu Jia said at the Qwen app launch held on the morning of the 15th, "Qwen can perform almost every type of task in the digital world. The core ones alone number more than 400. It can produce very good results in a series of tasks such as application development, work and study guidance, consulting research, data analysis, and generating visualized reports."
Qwen's big feature is that it can help users directly outside the chat window. That owes to Alibaba's ecosystem that spans mobile payment services and vertical platforms. The mobile pay app Alipay, the shopping app Taobao Flash Sale, the map app Amap, the travel platform Fliggy, and the ticketing app Damai, all serviced by Alibaba Group, are linked with Qwen.
For example, if you type a single line, "Order me a milk tea," Qwen finds and recommends the nearest milk tea shop through the map app and calls up the shopping app to propose a purchase. Once the user chooses a menu item, it brings up the linked mobile payment app to prompt payment. With one sentence of instruction and a few taps, users can get milk tea delivered. You can get similar help for work, study, shopping, and travel. The Qwen app was officially updated on the 15th, and it is free to use.
Wu said, "I think a good AI assistant should not be confined to the chat window. It should step out of the chat window, act autonomously, carry out tasks, and deliver results," adding, "Furthermore, we believe an AI assistant should not be trapped in the digital world. Entering the physical world to help people handle tasks in daily life is the complete form of an AI assistant." Wu also projected, "Over the next two years, AI will directly perform and deliver 60% to 70% of common tasks that make up the digital world."