ByteDance, owner of popular short-video app TikTok, on Thursday launched its first earbuds, which enable users to talk directly with the company's generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot without waking up their smartphone.

The open-ear wearables, Ola Friend, are currently available only in China. They are designed to serve as an audio assistant when the user is travelling, practising English, listening to music, or simply looking for company, according to the product description.

Once installed on a smartphone and connected to the earphones, ByteDance's chatbot can be activated with the prompt word "Doubao Doubao", derived from the name of the company's GenAI service launched last year. The service is powered by the firm's large language model - the technology behind GenAI applications - that is also called Doubao.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Weighing 6.6 grams each, the earbuds come in four colour options: purple, silver, black and white. Priced at 1,199 yuan (US$170), the device is set to ship from October 17 and is available for order on Alibaba Group Holding's Tmall marketplace, e-commerce platform JD.com, and ByteDance's own Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok.

The Ola Friend earbuds are available in four colours. Photo: Handout alt=The Ola Friend earbuds are available in four colours. Photo: Handout>

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

ByteDance introduced its latest product after completed the acquisition of Oladance, a five-year-old start-up based in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen in Guangdong province, last month.

The Beijing-based giant has doubled down on GenAI after OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, which ignited a global race in the fast-developing technology. Those efforts have shown initial success.

Doubao is now China's most widely used GenAI app, with 47 million monthly active users (MAUs) in September, followed by Baidu's Ernie Bot - recently rebranded as Wenxiaoyan - and Moonshot AI's Kimi, which had 12 million and 7 million MAUs, respectively, according to AIcpb.com, a site that tracks traffic to AI products worldwide.

Besides ByteDance, other Big Tech companies and start-ups have also been working on GenAI gadgets, betting that advancing AI technology can bring about a revival in wearables. Some, like Facebook owner Meta Platforms and rival Snap, have focused on smart glasses. Others, mostly start-ups, have been exploring more unconventional form factors, such as Rabbit's palm-sized R1 device and Humane's Ai Pin lapel.

ByteDance waded into hardware development as early as 2019, when it acquired local smartphone brand Smartisan. The team was later merged into ByteDance's educational technology department, which launched in 2020 a smart lamp that let parents voice-call their children.

In 2021, ByteDance bought Chinese virtual-reality (VR) start-up Pico at the height of the metaverse frenzy. It launched the Pico 4 Ultra, the latest version of its VR headset, in Europe and several Asian markets last month, and in China in August.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.