en.Wedoany.com Reported - On July 2, Alipay, under China's Ant Group, announced that its AI life assistant "Abao" has officially entered public beta. Users of iOS and Android systems can search for "Abao" or "Ant Abao" in app stores or within the Chinese Alipay app to experience it.
The focus of China's Alipay "Abao" is not simply adding a new chat entry point, but consolidating functions previously scattered across payments, travel, bill payments, government services, lifestyle services, and asset management into a single natural language-driven interface. In the past, users had to switch between the homepage, search bar, mini-programs, lifestyle accounts, and various service pages. Now, they can directly submit requests via text or voice, with "Abao" understanding the intent and invoking the corresponding services. On June 16, China's Alipay launched the AI version of Alipay and began invitation-based testing, revealing that users could access the chat interface by "swiping right," enabling tens of thousands of services to be invoked within a single dialog box. The new version will gradually roll out to all users.
This public beta marks the transition of Alipay's AI-driven overhaul from small-scale invitation testing to a larger user validation phase. For super apps, the value of an AI assistant lies not just in answering questions, but in reorganizing complex service processes into a model where "users state needs, the system finds paths, and users confirm key actions." Taking bill payments, inquiries, travel, charging, shipping, government services, and local lifestyle services as examples, what users truly need is not remembering where the entry points are, but completing tasks quickly. If China's Alipay "Abao" can stably identify user intent and accurately invoke in-app services, it will transform Alipay's previous usage model centered on feature displays and icon-based entry points, and further propel AI agents from content generation tools into scenarios involving consumer services and daily life tasks.
Security and authorization remain the bottom line for such AI payment products. China's Alipay has previously emphasized that Abao can assist users in completing tasks but will not directly handle their money; any steps involving fund changes or payment confirmation still require the user's own decision. This is also one of the biggest differences between an AI life assistant and ordinary tool-based agents. Payments, wealth management, transfers, consumption, and identity authentication are all highly sensitive scenarios. If an AI can invoke services without clear authorization boundaries, it could lead to issues such as erroneous operations, fraudulent commands, account risks, and liability determination. By retaining the decision-making power over funds for users themselves, China's Alipay is essentially drawing a line between "AI guides the process, users make the final confirmation." Whether the product can expand its scope of use in the future also depends on whether authorization mechanisms, risk control systems, abnormal transaction identification, privacy protection, and user education can keep pace.
The public beta of China's Alipay "Abao" will also impact competition for mobile internet service entry points. In the past, super apps relied on homepage entry points, search, mini-programs, and recommendation algorithms to distribute services. With the advent of AI assistants, the entry point may become a single sentence, a voice command, or a task goal. Whoever can more accurately understand user needs, connect more high-frequency services, and complete closed loops in scenarios like payments, travel, lifestyle, government services, and consumption, is likely to dominate the next phase of mobile service entry points. For merchants, service providers, and developers, this means the method of traffic distribution may change: services will no longer be discovered solely based on location, icons, and search rankings, but may also be invoked through the AI assistant's understanding of user needs. China's Alipay's public beta is essentially testing whether the AI assistant can handle larger volumes of real user requests and verifying the balance between service invocation, payment confirmation, security risk control, and user experience.
