(Yicai) Oct. 14 -- Qwen, the artificial intelligence business unit of Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group Holding, has released new smart glasses and a pair of earbuds developed in collaboration with US audio equipment giant Bose, offering hardware carriers for customer-oriented Personal Agents.

The Qwen Glasses N1, launched on major e-commerce platforms yesterday, are equipped with a 50-megapixel camera and offer round-the-clock environmental perception, translation, meeting minutes, and voice services, while the pro version adds real-time monitoring of physical signs, eye-movement interaction, and iris identity verification, among other features. The Qwen Clip earbuds support multilingual translation, AI real-time dictation, and task assignment.

After subsidies and discounts, the N1 glasses start at a retail price of CNY2,218 (USD331.45), the N1 Pro at CNY2,600, and the Clip at CNY1,099.

"The goal of Qwen is to become everyone's Personal Agent," Vice President Song Gang said at the new products' launch event. "We believe that AI wearables are an extension of Qwen in the physical world and an important part of Personal Agents."

Qwen's AI hardware aims to solve the problem of AI transitioning from waiting for instructions to active services, help users express their intentions more naturally, and truly integrate these devices into people's daily lives, Song stressed.

The N1 Pro are the industry's first AI glasses with real-time monitoring of physical signs, able to check the wearer's heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature, and other physical indexes, and remind users to adjust their movement rhythm when necessary. The additional features of the pro version aim to enhance the interactive convenience of AI hardware.

By positioning AI wearables as an extension of Personal Agents in the physical world, Alibaba is shifting the focus of competition in the AI wearables industry from hardware parameters to the perception and execution capabilities of Personal Agents, extending from the functionality of a single device to the integration and collaboration between AI glasses and the Qwen models, as well as its ecosystem, an industry insider told Yicai. This enables wearables and the intelligent agents they are based on to better understand users' surroundings and call related services to complete relevant tasks, the person said.

For Alibaba and other manufacturers that are trying to turn AI wearable hardware into an entry point for Personal Agents, unblocking software and hardware ecosystems, as well as the ability to understand complex user intentions, are becoming the key to gaining a leading position in the next stage of industry competition, the insider pointed out.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev