ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan) is Baidu’s flagship AI assistant for writing, learning, translation, and everyday questions in Chinese and English.
Note: The service now goes by Wenxin Assistant (Wenxin Yiyan), and its official entrance has moved to wenxin.baidu.com.
ERNIE Bot, powered by Baidu’s ERNIE model family, is one of China’s most widely used AI assistants. It helps students and professionals with essay drafting, homework explanations, translation, and summarization, and it generates images and analyzes documents and images in conversation. Deep integration with Baidu Search keeps answers current, and specialized education features explain problems step by step and provide writing feedback in natural Chinese. The assistant is available free on web and mobile, with API access through Baidu’s Qianfan platform for developers. Baidu’s search integration keeps answers current on topics where static models lag, and the education features explain problems step by step in natural Chinese. Document and image understanding broadens what students can ask about, from textbook photos to lab reports. Free consumer access has driven adoption across Chinese students and professionals.
ERNIE Bot is free for consumers: Baidu retired the earlier paid membership and made the assistant free for all users on web and mobile, including its advanced search features. Developers pay only for what they use through the API on Baidu’s Qianfan platform, billed per token, and enterprise solutions are quoted separately.
ERNIE Bot is for Chinese-speaking students, professionals, and general users who want a capable AI assistant for study, writing, and daily questions with strong Chinese fluency. General Chinese users doing homework help, translation, and daily writing form the broad consumer base.
Yes. Baidu made the consumer assistant completely free, retiring its earlier paid membership; only developer API usage on the Qianfan platform is billed, per token.
Yes, Baidu offers ERNIE model APIs through its Qianfan platform for developers and enterprises building Chinese-language applications. Baidu’s Qianfan platform provides ERNIE APIs for developers and enterprises building applications.
ERNIE Bot benefits from Baidu’s search ecosystem, while Kimi leads on long documents and iFLYTEK Spark on education-specific hardware integration. ERNIE Bot’s search grounding is its differentiator against Kimi’s long-document strength and Spark’s education focus.