(Yicai Global) March 20 -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s artificial intelligence lab will hold its spring product release conference in Beijing on March 22, at which it may reveal its latest smart speaker, the Tmall Genie X2.

Tmall Genie published a poster on social media to promote the event, and internet users speculate that the conference could mark the unveiling of the second-generation smart speaker which could feature touchscreen interaction. Others put forward that the Hangzhou-based firm will unveil a smart television.

Baidu Inc., one of Alibaba's key rivals in artificial intelligence and other digital fields, had said shortly before Alibaba's post on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform, that it would release China's first smart touchscreen speaker on March 26, fueling assumptions that the Genie X2's introduction was coming soon.

Alibaba released the Tmall Genie X1 on July 5. It has a first-gen man-machine communication system, AiGenie, which can understand Mandarin Chinese voice commands and control home devices. The company founded its AI lab, which is mainly responsible for creating AI products aimed at consumers, in 2016, but kept it under wraps until it release the Genie X1.