(Yicai) Oct. 10 -- ByteDance launched its first earbuds, Ola Friend, which allow users to speak with the Chinese tech giant’s Doubao chatbot without needing a smartphone.

The earbuds, released today, are priced at CNY1,199 (USD169) and are available for pre-order on major e-commerce platforms in China. They will start being shipped out on Oct. 17.

Ola Friend can help users with information retrieval, travel, learning English, and communication, ByteDance said. Users can interact with Doubao just as if they were chatting with a friend, and its voice has been made to sound realistic. The artificial intelligence can express emotions such as happiness and surprise.

The AI features of the earbuds will be continuously updated after the product’s release, the Beijing-based company added.

ByteDance is well-known for its flagship product, TikTok, but has increasingly focused on expanding its technology portfolio into AI and smart devices.

In recent years, various businesses have been exploring the integration of AI with wearable devices. At the end of last year, Meta released the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with the integrated Llama large language model. Smart glasses maker Solos has also said it will launch AirGo Vision smart glasses, using GPT-4o, while Apple and Midjourney are also exploring the integration of AI in headsets.

The Doubao app, which is based on the Doubao LLM, has become the most active AI content generator in the country. It reached 27.52 million monthly active users in the first half of this year, 2.43 times that of Baidu’s Ernie Bot, which was in second place.

The hardware for Ola Friend was developed by Oladance, a Shenzhen-based headphone maker acquired by ByteDance in May.

Editor: Tom Litting