Alibaba Cloud wants to "inject soul" into thousands of hardware devices.
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Author | Zhou Zhiyu
Editor | Zhang Xiaoling
In the past two years, when we talk about AI, what we mostly discuss is the cursor on the screen, the words constantly being generated in a dialogue box. It's powerful, but it always feels a bit removed from everyday life.
Tech companies have also been experimenting with various smart hardware, but only a few have had the chance to try them out.
Alibaba Cloud is trying to break through this barrier. On January 8, Alibaba Cloud released a multimodal interaction development toolkit, which essentially means one thing: the application of AI finally has a tangible form.
It seeks to make AI more than just an ethereal cloud brain, but give soul to the glasses on your nose, or the teddy bear in a child’s arms.
Xu Dong, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Large Model business, pointed out that combining large models with hardware will bring new traffic.
This is no longer just a shallow story about how well cloud services sell, but a strategic game about the migration of entry points. In Xu Dong’s view, although smartphones take up much of our time, they are mostly “one-way input”; the soon-to-explode AI hardware is trying to take over people’s memory and lives in a more fragmented and sticky way.
The "Multimodal Interaction Development Toolkit" released by Alibaba Cloud is designed to hand gold diggers the most handy shovel in this new land.
What is a tangible AI landing? The first is speed.
In the virtual world, you can tolerate ChatGPT thinking and spinning for three seconds; but in the physical world, if you ask your glasses "what's ahead," a reply after three seconds is meaningless. Interaction in the physical world must be instantaneous.
The core breakthrough of Alibaba Cloud's toolkit this time is compressing the response speed of the “cloud brain” to the limits of the physical world. End-to-end voice interaction latency is as low as 1 second, and video interaction latency as low as 1.5 seconds.
What does this mean? It means the feedback from the machine finally matches human speech rates. For example, the AI glasses jointly developed by Thunderbird Innovation and Alibaba Cloud achieved an average of 1.3 seconds for simultaneous interpretation and multimodal interaction. When "understanding" and "feedback" happen almost simultaneously, AI is no longer a tool you have to intentionally invoke, but becomes an instinctive reaction of the hardware itself.
This transformation brings us from the flat world of “Chatbot” to the three-dimensional world of hardware interaction. This extreme low latency is the physical foundation for AI to go from being a novelty to being grounded.
This could be an important step for AI to accelerate into people's lives.
Before, cloud vendors focused their business on how much they earned per Token (computing unit). This made hardware vendors reluctant or unable to use their services. For hardware that costs a few hundred yuan, monthly cloud service fees might outweigh the device itself.
To truly make AI take root, Alibaba Cloud has directly smashed the threshold this time. They have changed the billing model from unpredictable Token-based to “per device License” or low-cost packages that better fit hardware sales logic.
Alibaba Cloud not only provides the models, but also pre-installs more than a dozen Agents and MCP tools, so hardware vendors can develop devices with complex capabilities simply by dragging and dropping.
This is also Alibaba Cloud’s bet on the future: when tens of thousands of physical devices are equipped with Tongyi’s “soul,” the data, stickiness, and entry value generated by these devices will far exceed the income from selling computing power.
Another tangible aspect of AI landing is the establishment of integrated hardware-software standards.
At the expo, Alibaba Cloud showcased its deep integration with RISC-V architecture (Xuantie chips). Alibaba Group Vice President Qi Xiaoning likened it to: CPU as the body, AI as the soul.
This is a very clear signal: in the fragmented physical world (IoT), Alibaba Cloud is trying to use the “Tongyi Large Model + RISC-V chip” combo to build a new Wintel alliance.
In the future, Tongyi Large Model will also achieve integrated software-hardware collaboration with Xuantie RISC-V, enabling optimal deployment and inference performance for the Tongyi family of models on RISC-V architecture.
This means a lot to developers in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen. They don't need to understand complex algorithms or adapt chips themselves; with Alibaba Cloud’s “key,” they can open the door to AI hardware. This directly spawns the birth of a multitude of “new species.”
In Xu Dong's view, 2026 will be the year these new hardware products explode onto the scene. For example, Hearing Bear isn’t a cold, mechanical repeater, but a growth companion that understands children’s unique ways of expressing themselves and resonates emotionally. It can chat for over an hour without awkward pauses—this kind of high-stickiness interaction is something a mobile app can't do.
Likewise, AI glasses free up your hands and interpret the world through their camera. When a user sees a ball rolling onto the road, it can infer that there may be a child behind—it’s this understanding of causality that makes physical AI so fascinating.
Xu Dong even mentioned niche hardware like the “flash capsule.” Though seemingly inconspicuous, they solve big problems in specific scenarios (like moms recording notes, meeting minutes).
When the landing of AI becomes tangible, what we see are no longer the same old smartphones, but diverse “new species.”
Everything Alibaba Cloud is doing today—making billing more user-friendly, lowering development thresholds to drag-and-drop, embedding the model into domestic chips—is building momentum for the moment when these new species explode onto the market.
It is also attempting to seek the next fountainhead of traffic in the physical world, in fragmented scenarios.
As Xu Dong said, internet traffic has reached its peak, but traffic in the physical world is just beginning.
From the moment the development toolkit was released, Alibaba Cloud has tried to hand every hardware vendor a ticket to the new era. This may not be the most profitable business, but it is definitely the most correct path—because only when AI truly lands in the physical world can that long-anticipated intelligent era truly begin.
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