Baidu is infusing artificial intelligence into its search engine

Chinese tech company Baidu is incorporating AI features and voice function into its search platform to maintain a competitive edge against rivals like DeepSeek.

The company insists that it would like its mobile search platform to function more similarly to an AI chatbot, helping users with their creative and organizing tasks.

It also clarified that their platform will prioritize natural language searches rather than keywords and support voice search in multiple Chinese dialects moving forward.

Dan Ives, global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, even commented, “There has been some small pressure on the search business, but the focus on AI and Ernie Bot is a key move ahead. Baidu is not waiting around to watch the paint dry, full steam ahead on AI.”

Also commenting on their AI transition, the firm’s search lead, Zhao Shiqi, stated that they want to change their platform not to outpace others but rather to surpass their former self.

Baidu’s search platform includes new features, including a voice search function

Baidu is still the biggest search engine, though the company has seen some users move to AI chatbots like Deepseek and ChatGPT, losing part of its market. Short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou are also integrating AI, threatening to snatch away at Baidu’s market. 

So far, the tech giant has posted losses in its online marketing revenue in the last four quarters, though it believes its new focus on AI would ultimately boost its ad performance. 

The company has already instituted major changes to its search platform. For starters, users can now input over a thousand characters, far more than the previous 28-character limit in their searches. In addition, users can ask questions in a more natural, conversational style, similar to how they interact with chatbots, and even prompt the search engine with images and files. Moreover, the platform can generate photos and videos per the user’s request, and includes a voice search function.

On Wednesday, the tech firm launched its image-to-video model, hoping the AI generation function will enable marketers to craft compelling videos on Baidu’s social feeds.

Baidu is hopeful AI can elevate its cloud division market, allowing it to compete with Alibaba.

Baidu also bet on artificial intelligence to boost its cloud division and eventually beat competitors like Alibaba Holdings and Tencent. The company’s shares have only increased by about 2.5% in 2025, falling behind a 30.5% spike for Alibaba and a 20% surge for Tencent.

Baidu delivered better-than-expected first-quarter 2025 results, with adjusted earnings and total revenues topping the Zacks Consensus Estimate. On a year-over-year basis, the bottom line tumbled while the top line grew.

The performance was fueled by strong growth in the Baidu Core segment, particularly its AI Cloud business, which surged 42% compared to the same period last year. The rapid expansion reflects increasing market recognition of Baidu’s full-stack AI solutions and competitive price-performance edge.

However, increased costs, elevated selling, and general and administrative expenses hurt the company’s bottom line during the quarter.

Still under the AI Cloud business, the company enhanced its MaaS platform, Qianfan, with an expanded model library and more comprehensive toolkits, extending support for training and fine-tuning multimodal and reasoning models to facilitate AI-native application development further. Furthermore, in April 2025, Baidu released the 3.0 version of its deep learning framework, PaddlePaddle.

Ives argued that the company has to be “aggressive and perception-wise to show they are not the little brother to Tencent on the AI front”, encouraging more AI infusion.

The tech giant is also confident that its Ernie foundation models will stand up to challengers like DeepSeek, helping encourage a broader ecosystem of AI-native applications.

The company introduced the bot in 2023 and has been focused on updating the models ever since. This April, the tech giant released the Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo, advertised as faster and cheaper than the other versions. The X1 Turbo, in particular, seems designed to compete with open-sourced models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek.

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