Baidu spent Tuesday afternoon trying to prove that the smart speaker is not dead — it just needed an agent inside it. At a Baidu AI Day event in Beijing, the company's home-hardware arm Xiaodu launched four devices and, more importantly, rewired the assistant that runs them. The upgraded Chaoneng Xiaodu ("Super Xiaodu") no longer waits for commands. It decomposes goals, dispatches tools across devices, and reports back when the job is done — including, in the case of Xiaodu's cameras, a second-generation monitoring agent that decides on its own when to escalate a reminder about your child or your parent.
The hardware is the visible part: the Xiaodu Tiantian companion screen Ultra, the Xiaodu Smart Screen X9 Ultra, the Xiaodu Smart Camera C1500, and the Xiaodu Smart Speaker Pro Max — the brand's first speaker with a display, which goes on sale September 28. All four ship with Baidu Dazi, the Ernie-based agent platform Baidu launched on March 22 this year, connected directly to the device.
Li Ying, vice president of Baidu Group and chief executive of Xiaodu Technology, framed the shift as an architectural problem rather than a feature list. Home AI, she said, has to deal with "multiple family members, multiple devices, multiple spaces, multiple scenarios and continuously running complex tasks." The agent upgrade, she added, "is not just about adding a few features, but about building a system-level capability that serves the entire household."
What Xiaodu actually shipped
The clearest demonstration was a family-schedule agent. A parent sends a WeChat message, a voice note, a photo or a document from their phone; the assistant parses it, turns it into a household task, checks it against what is already booked, flags conflicts, pushes it to the smart screen at home and to other Xiaodu devices, and sends a completion record back to the parent's WeChat. It is a mundane use case, and that is rather the point — Baidu is betting that agents earn their keep in family logistics, not in chat transcripts.
The C1500 carries the headline capability: care tasks that users define in their own words, a tiered escalation system for reminders, and AI-generated monitoring reports. Its gimbal pairs an 8mm telephoto with a 4mm short lens for 10x hybrid zoom, with a fixed 2.8mm ultra-wide at the base. First-sale price is 386 yuan (roughly $54).
The X9 Ultra is an 8-inch smart display with a motorised gimbal camera on top — a 1/2.9-inch 2MP wide-dynamic sensor with infrared night vision that swivels to track movement it senses outside its field of view. It adds Wi-Fi 6, infrared appliance control, and a refreshed elder mode recognising 15 Chinese dialects. It lists at 839 yuan with a launch price of 629 yuan (about $88).
At the other end, the Tiantian Ultra is a 32-inch 4K paper-like portable touchscreen with a 15,000 mAh battery rated for 12 hours of video, plus homework help, a whiteboard and around 1,500 fitness classes. It lists at 7,099 yuan, with a launch price of 5,549 yuan (roughly $780). The Speaker Pro Max — a 3-inch 12W driver with a small colour display, long-term memory, and built-in temperature, humidity and light sensors that adjust appliances unprompted — lists at 349 yuan and first-sells at 299 yuan.
Li Ying also disclosed traction numbers. Chaoneng Xiaodu, she said, is now in more than 55 million households, with daily deep voice interactions up nearly 300%. Xiaodu's one-sentence-setup AI care feature has reached 67% penetration among camera users, with a 94% retention rate among those who use it — unusually sticky for a smart-home feature, and the strongest argument Baidu has for pushing the same agent into the rest of its installed base.
Why It Matters
China's smart speaker market has been contracting for years, and the three incumbents have been fighting over a shrinking pie: 2026 share estimates circulating in the Chinese trade press put Xiaomi above 50%, Baidu around 22% and Alibaba's Tmall Genie near 20%, with Tmall Genie buying volume through price cuts. Baidu cannot win a price war against Xiaomi's ecosystem, so it is trying to change what the category is for. A 629-yuan display that autonomously tracks an elderly parent and files a care report is not competing on speaker specs at all.
The deeper strategic logic is distribution. Baidu Dazi had 6.74 million monthly active users in July 2026 — second among Chinese AI office agents, but from a small base, and confined to desktop and app. Pushing the same agent layer into 55 million homes converts a modest software product into an ambient one, and gives Baidu what it calls its "chip-cloud-model-agent" stack a consumer endpoint. That matters commercially: Baidu reported Q2 2026 revenue of RMB 31.3 billion, down 4% year-on-year, with AI-related business at RMB 12.5 billion — about half of core revenue — while legacy marketing continued to erode. Ernie needs consumer surfaces, and the living room is one Baidu already owns.
It also matters that this is a monitoring product. An agent that autonomously decides a reminder should escalate is making a judgement about a household, and the raw material is continuous video of children and elderly relatives. Baidu did not announce a retention period for camera footage or for the family schedules the assistant will now hold — an omission that will draw scrutiny as always-on home agents scale, in China and anywhere Xiaodu eventually exports.
What to watch
Three things. First, the rollout to the installed base: agent capabilities reach existing devices only "progressively," and the November 2025 Chaoneng Xiaodu upgrade drew complaints from speaker owners unhappy with the new voice — free upgrades to 55 million homes are not risk-free. Second, whether 299 yuan is enough to defend share against Tmall Genie's discounting. Third, whether Alibaba and Xiaomi answer with agent platforms of their own before Singles' Day, when Chinese smart-home buying peaks. Baidu has moved first on agentic home hardware. It has roughly eight weeks to prove that first was also right.
“The agent upgrade is not just about adding a few features, but about building a system-level capability that serves the entire household.”— Li Ying, VP, Baidu Group and CEO, Xiaodu Technology