(Yicai) Aug. 10 -- Youdao has released an electronic pen for students that carries a large language model developed by

the Chinese edtech company under internet giant NetEase in order to keep up with the pack as an increasing number of educational hardware firms harness the power of artificial intelligence.

X6 Pro, which is selling for CNY1,399 (USD194), contains Youdao’s LLM Ziyue that was released last month, Yicai learned at a press briefing yesterday. The pen comes with a screen and serves as a dictionary, offers knowledge quizzes and it can help with learning grammar and enunciation.

Youdao also released an intelligent oral speech trainer called Youdao Tinglibao Pro yesterday, which is powered by Ziyue and is priced at CNY1,099.

There is a lot of room for the use of LLMs in education, as they provide personalized tutoring services and can help tailor education by relying on their strong language understanding and processing capabilities, Chief Executive Officer Zhou Feng said on July 26, when Ziyue was released.

Youdao is not the first edtech firm to harness AI. In May, Iflytek released an AI teaching machine based on its self-developed AI cognition model Spark which can correct writing and speech. And the same month Baidu-backed Xiaodu Technology unveiled a learning smartphone which also uses a LLM.

Smart hardware makers can make their products more intelligent by using LLMs and thus keep the competition at bay, Chen Liteng, an analyst at e-commerce research institute 100EC, told Yicai. Educational providers will face challenges from technology, cost and data security in developing LLMs.

Hopefully the smart pen will help boost Youdao’s performance. The firm logged losses of CNY204 million (USD29.8 million) in the first quarter, double that of the same period last year, while revenue slumped 3.1 percent to CNY1.2 billion (USD169.4 million), according to its latest earnings report. Revenue from smart hardware plunged 16 percent to CNY212.7 million.

Editor: Kim Taylor