Advertisement
Artificial intelligence
TechBig Tech

Alibaba adds ChatGPT-style AI to meeting assistant app with wider roll-out plans including DingTalk integration

  • Alibaba is adding generative artificial intelligence to its meeting assistant app Tingwu to help it summarise recordings
  • The features are expected to soon be integrated into Slack-like DingTalk as competition ramps up with other domestic players like Baidu

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
1
Alibaba is integrating its large language model Tongyi Qianwen into more products, including a meeting assistant to help it summarise recordings. Photo: Shutterstock
Ben Jiangin Beijing
Alibaba Group Holding has started baking its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI) into a range of service offerings, including meeting assistant Tingwu and Slack-like office collaboration platform DingTalk, as local technology firms ratchet up efforts to promote their own flavours of generative AI.
Advertisement
The Hangzhou-based e-commerce giant, which owns the South China Morning Post, said on Thursday that it integrated its large language model (LLM) Tongyi Qianwen into Tingwu, which records and transcribes meetings. It was originally launched in October 2021, when online conference calls were still the norm in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The AI integration will power an updated version of the meeting assistant, now called Tongyi Tingwu, and is currently available for public beta testing. The upgrade allows for more complex tasks such as summarising audio and video content with higher accuracy, according to the company’s announcement.

“Tongyi Tingwu aims to use the large language model to facilitate faster and better comprehension and easier sharing of multimedia content,” Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, said in the statement.

DingTalk will also soon get similar AI functionality, as the company looks to integrate the capabilities of Tongyi Tingwu into a wider range of productivity-focused products and services.

DingTalk president Ye Jun first showcased how the collaboration platform might use this technology in mid-April, during a live demo of the app composing articles based on simple prompts. It can also summarise group discussions.

Advertisement

Alibaba’s move to leverage AI comes hot on the heels of a vow made by Baidu to do the same last week.

Advertisement