Alibaba rivals Ray-Ban Meta with Quark AI smart glasses

In line with notable advancements in the artificial intelligence-powered wearable market, retail giant Alibaba on Thursday released its new, AI-backed smart glasses called Quark in China.

The debut of Amazon's Quark glasses is a testament to the company’s efforts to break into the AI wearables market, which is largely dominated by Meta globally.

Quark smart glasses' specs, features and design

Powered by the Qwen AI model and app, these glasses would be deeply integrated with Alibaba's flagship apps, such as payment app Alipay and its shopping site Taobao. 

These apps will allow users to use Quark for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.

Design-wise, what sets Quark glasses apart from Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta AI Glasses is that they look like regular eyewear, adorned with a sober black plastic frame.

Alibaba Quark glasses' prices

The prices of Quark glasses will reportedly start from 1,899 yuan ($268.25) for the headset.

The glasses come in the midst of the company's massive push into the consumer AI market after years of lagging behind rivals. Earlier this month, it also rolled out a major upgrade to its AI chatbot.

The race to innovate new forms of entertainment and computing devices, backed by AI, has led to a battle among the biggest technology companies, with the Facebook maker, Meta, leading the VR headset industry with around 80% market share under its belt.

Similarly, Apple's formidable contender in to the growing AI wearable race is the pricey Vision Pro headset, and Samsung Electronics recently launched its Galaxy XR extended reality headset that is powered by Gemini's AI capabilities.

It must be noted that other Chinese tech companies have also introduced similar AI-powered glasses, with Xiaomi launching a product in June and Baidu already selling a similar product.