Baidu Smart Cloud and Little Bear Electric reach a billion-yuan strategic partnership to develop a new generation of AI small home appliances.

China Securities Journal China Securities Network, March 12 (reporter Sun Xiaocheng): Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Bear Electric Appliances (002959) officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two sides announced that within the next three years, they will carry out an AI strategic cooperation with a scale of 100 million yuan. Leveraging Baidu ERNIE 5.0 large model and Baidu Intelligent Cloud’s AI technology capabilities, they will develop in-depth cooperation around AI large models and smart home appliance scenarios, jointly promoting innovation in the next generation of AI small home appliance products and upgrading the industry.

On the product side, the two sides will focus on upgrading AI capabilities for Bear Electric Appliances’ core product categories, including air fryers, health kettles, rice cookers, and other small home appliance products. Based on ERNIE large model capabilities, the next generation of AI home appliances will have natural voice dialogue, intelligent service, and content ecosystem capabilities. Through end-to-end voice interaction (ASR + LLM + TTS), they will enable low-latency voice control and natural human-machine interaction.

In addition to product innovation, the cooperation will also extend to the company’s intelligent transformation and upgrades. Bear Electric Appliances will introduce Baidu AI coding assistant Comate to improve R&D efficiency, and combine capabilities such as AI digital humans and AIGC content generation to enhance brand marketing, e-commerce operations, and user service capabilities, achieving an intelligent upgrade across the full chain of R&D, production, supply, sales, and service.

Consumers of small home appliances are mostly price-sensitive. After new AI capabilities are added to the products, will they bring corresponding price premiums and affect consumers’ willingness?

Bear Electric Appliances’ General Manager Li Yifeng said to a reporter from China Securities Journal that the Chinese market has ample consumer purchasing power. Price wars in the industry have gradually weakened, and consumers’ consumption orientation has also shifted toward health and wellness, time costs, and emotional value. AI home appliances will indeed face certain cost pressures in the initial stage, but as technology advances and applications scale up, costs will gradually decline. In addition, Bear will manage costs well at the operational level, so costs will not become a core obstacle.

In terms of brand impressions, Li Yifeng expects that AI home appliances will transform Bear from a mere small home appliance hardware provider into a partner-style brand that can provide users with scenario-based solutions and emotional value, breaking the public’s single perception of Bear as only “high cost-performance.”

When discussing the cooperation between the two sides, Baidu Group Deputy Vice President Yuan Fuyu made an analogy with embodied intelligence. In the home appliance industry, hardware manufacturing and supply-chain control capabilities are like the “brain,” which already has strong competitiveness; while large models are like the “brain,” endowing home appliances with capabilities for autonomous planning and autonomous perception, enabling them to learn and evolve on their own during daily interactions with consumers.

“For consumer electronics companies, embracing large-model technology earlier and more firmly can give them stronger market competitiveness during industry upgrades.” Yuan Fuyu said.

Yuan Fuyu believes that the cooperation with Bear Electric Appliances is an important real-world implementation of Baidu’s AI technology in the physical manufacturing industry and the broader consumption scenarios, validating the commercial value of the technology. China’s home appliance manufacturing industry has a solid foundation. This cooperation is an important initiative for Baidu to pragmatically implement AI technology by leveraging advantages in the Chinese market, and it also confirms Baidu’s AI commercialization approach of “underlying technology + scaled scenarios.”