Tencent Tests AI Assistant Xiaowei in WeChat to Catch Up With Rivals

Tencent has begun testing a new AI assistant built into WeChat, China's most popular app for messaging, payments and shopping. The company has rolled out the tool, called Xiaowei, to a small group of users for now, as it tries to close the gap with Chinese rivals that have been faster to build generative AI into their flagship products.

Xiaowei handles both voice and text commands, and its key feature is the ability to tap into WeChat's mini-programs, the built-in micro-apps that handle payments, food delivery, ride-hailing and shopping. Instead of opening a separate app, users can ask the assistant to complete a task, and it decides which mini-program to launch and how to carry out the transaction.

How Xiaowei Works

The assistant relies primarily on the Weixin Large Model, Tencent's own language model known as WeLM. For some queries, especially those requiring deeper reasoning, the system switches to DeepSeek, the Chinese model that gained attention for delivering high performance at relatively low computing cost. This hybrid approach lets Tencent keep infrastructure costs down while still offering features comparable to competing solutions.

Observed capabilities of the tool include changing app settings, drafting messages, ordering food, hailing rides and generating images. All of this happens within a single conversation with the assistant, without switching between WeChat's separate functions.

The Race for Super-Apps

Chinese tech platforms have spent months competing to see who can more effectively weave agentic AI into their existing super-apps, rather than building separate chatbots. Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Group are testing a similar voice-and-text assistant in the Alipay payments app, letting users book rides and order meals. ByteDance, meanwhile, is developing its own Doubao, which according to earlier reports already has tens of millions of users and is expanding into the enterprise segment.

The stakes are high for Tencent. The company has long been seen as a player with an unmatched user base, but one that has been slower than rivals to translate that advantage into deploying the latest AI models. Successfully embedding an assistant in WeChat could help the company not only catch up functionally, but also open a new revenue stream by monetizing the technology among more than a billion users.

WeChat's distribution advantage is unquestionable, but Tencent is still catching up on the capability side of the AI itself - Beijing-based AI researcher quoted in reports on the Xiaowei tests

Market Reaction and Open Questions

Investors responded to the news of the tests by sending Tencent shares down 1.64 percent on the Hong Kong exchange on the day of the announcement, which some commentators attribute to uncertainty over the pace and cost of rolling out new AI features at such scale. The company has not officially said when Xiaowei will reach a wider group of WeChat users, or how it plans to account for the cost of queries routed to DeepSeek.

Questions also remain about security and control over transactions the assistant carries out on a user's behalf, including payments and orders placed through mini-programs. At WeChat's scale, even a small percentage of misinterpreted commands could translate into a large number of incidents, which is why Tencent is keeping the tests closed for now.

For readers in Poland, this episode is above all a sign of how quickly agentic AI is spreading into the world's most widely used apps, even when it happens outside Western markets. The mechanism by which an AI assistant decides on its own which app function to launch mirrors the direction Western giants including Google and Meta are also heading, as they test similar agentic tools in their own messaging apps and search engines.

Tencent has not disclosed how many users are taking part in the current testing phase or what criteria will determine any further expansion of access to Xiaowei. Given the pace at which Chinese rivals are rolling out new agentic features, the coming months could bring a rapid expansion of testing to a larger group of WeChat users.