Tencent launches limited trial of Xiaowei AI on WeChat

Tencent has begun limited testing of a new AI assistant named Xiaowei within its WeChat super-app, marking a significant step in the company's effort to integrate artificial intelligence into one of China's most widely used digital platforms. The trial, which started on Monday, June 22, 2026, is currently available only to a select group of users.

Xiaowei is designed to act as a command layer over WeChat's extensive ecosystem. Users can interact with it via text or voice to perform tasks such as sending messages, making calls, ordering food, hailing rides, and navigating the app's vast library of mini-programs. The assistant is powered primarily by Tencent's proprietary large language model, WeLM, but also delegates some queries to DeepSeek, an AI startup in which Tencent is a major investor.

This rollout represents Tencent's most ambitious move yet to embed AI directly into WeChat, which has over 1.4 billion users. The company already offers a standalone chatbot called Yuanbao within the app, but Xiaowei is positioned as a more proactive agent capable of executing tasks on a user's behalf across different services. According to company statements, the goal is to eventually...