Alibaba used its 2026 Apsara Conference to show off a genuinely wide spread of new AI hardware, all tied together under its Qwen ecosystem and aimed at weaving AI more directly into everyday work and life.
The centerpiece is Qwen Book, described as an agentic computer running on Qwen Desktop OS, Alibaba’s own AI-native operating system. The device is able to tie interface, context, runtime, and hardware control into one unified environment where the AI genuinely understands what you’re working on and can act on it. The example Alibaba gave is a good illustration of the idea: while editing a presentation, you can speak commands through the stylus, which doubles as a microphone, and Qwen Book will pull the file from the cloud, find the right slide, and make the edit automatically. You can even review and approve those changes later from your phone while you’re out and about.
Meanwhile, there’s the Qwen Glasses N1 and N1 Pro, along with its first pair of AI earbuds, the Qwen Clip. The Glasses N1 series captures first-person HD footage through a 50-megapixel sensor, and the Pro model adds eye-tracking for visual interaction, including object recognition and even iris-based payment, letting you pay for something just by looking at it.
The Qwen Clip earbuds use an open-ear, clip-on design and build in the Qwen AI assistant for things like face-to-face translation, AI note-taking, and voice-driven task execution.
Rounding things out is QwenNote A2, an upgraded portable note-taking device building on Alibaba’s earlier DingTalk A1. It’s designed to capture real conversations and turn them into usable context for AI agents, integrating directly with QwenWork so you can assign tasks by voice and have conversations transcribed on the go. QwenWork can then process those recordings and hand things off to DingTalk to send messages, schedule meetings, create to-do lists, or even generate spreadsheets automatically.
Powered by Alibaba’s Qwen-Audio model, the device supports real-time back-and-forth, letting you interrupt or ask follow-up questions mid-conversation. It’s genuinely compact too, weighing just 67 grams, with six microphones picking up audio from up to eight meters away, and it can work thanks to built-in 4 G connectivity.
On privacy, Alibaba says audio is encrypted during transmission and deleted right after transcription, keeping only the resulting text and summaries. The device supports up to 40 hours of continuous transcription and 18 days of standby time.
