DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace communications platform, is now inviting enterprise customers to test its new AI functions in the app. The AI functions are capable of generating text, images, and meeting summaries, as well as organizing meeting notes and creating chatbots based on provided materials.
Why it matters: Chinese tech majors have been keen to showcase their AI capabilities since ChatGPT’s launch made it a global phenomenon. DingTalk is one of the first major workplace communication apps to integrate AI functions into its offering. ByteDance’s Feishu (known as Lark in the overseas market) also announced in April that it will integrate a new similar AI assistant called “My AI” into the app, but has yet to begin open testing.
Details: Users can access AI capabilities by typing the forward slash “/” in DingTalk. The company first showed off DingTalk’s AI-powered capabilities in a demonstration in April.
- The AI assistant is capable of summarizing previous conversations in a group chat within 10 seconds, the company said on its official WeChat account. Tech outlet 36Kr tested the tool and reported that the AI assistant can accurately summarize text-based conversations, but has limited abilities in understanding multi-modal content.
- Additionally, the AI assistant is able to recognize patterns and text to generate small applications like forms and surveys based on simple prompts.
- In document writing scenarios, the AI assistant can perform tasks such as continuation writing, summary generation, proofreading, content enrichment, and tone adjustment. It can also assist in creative writing in various scenarios. But according to multiple outlets that have used the function, the generated content still requires manual refinement and linguistic optimization.
Context: Alibaba also announced on Thursday that it is integrating its ChatGPT-like service into a meeting assistant called Tingwu that focuses on converting speech and videos to text in real-time.
- Despite facing stiff competition in the collaborative office software market, DingTalk has managed to remain competitive. According to QuestMobile, DingTalk recorded 199 million monthly active users in April, ahead of Tencent’s Enterprise WeChat with 102 million MAUs and ByteDance-owned Feishu with 12 million MAUs.
- During Alibaba’s large AI model Tongyi Qianwen’s launch event, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s chairman and CEO and the head of its cloud business, said that all businesses across the company should upgrade their offerings with the AI model.