(Yicai) Oct. 23 -- Quark, a smart search engine under Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, launched a new Dialogue Assistant feature today to challenge Doubao, a leading artificial intelligence chatbot in China.

Quark’s Dialogue Assistant is powered by Qwen3-Max, the latest version of Alibaba’s Qwen large language model series. It can engage in multi-round conversations and respond to users based on personalized information learned by Quark, Yicai learned from Hangzhou-based Alibaba today.

To ensure the professionalism of the generated content, Quark’s algorithm team has formed a joint research and development group with the Qwen development team, focusing on search reasoning and trusted generation, the company said.

Launched in 2016, Quark is a smart search engine developed by Alibaba based on the UC Browser it had acquired earlier. In March, Alibaba announced plans to build Quark into an all-in-one AI app as part of its latest strategy to advance its AI-to-consumer business. The move could be seen as a way for the Tmall owner to improve its native AI app Tongyi, which has fallen behind rivals in user traffic.

According to the latest data from QuestMobile, Doubao, backed by ByteDance Technology, reached 157 million monthly active users on mobile in August, surpassing DeepSeek to top the list of Chinese AI apps, while Tongyi’s MAUs have stabilized at around three million.

Compared with native AI apps, Quark has attracted a large user base with its smart search function, reaching 150 million MAUs. Alibaba noted that the new Dialogue Assistant can work synergistically with its search capabilities to help reduce AI hallucinations.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Emmi Laine