Baidu renames the ERNIE Bot app Wenxiaoyan

Background

ERNIE Bot was the name of Baidu's AI assistant app before the change. By August 2024 it was the second-most popular AI app in China, behind ByteDance's Doubao, according to South China Morning Post citing the tracking site aicpb.com ^[3]. By the time of the rename, more than 900,000 customised agents had been created on the app ^[3].

What happened

On 4 September 2024, Baidu upgraded the ERNIE Bot app and renamed it 文小言 (Wenxiaoyan) ^[1]. The company positioned the revamped app as a "new search" intelligent assistant ^[1][3]. Wikipedia describes the move as a repositioning of the app as a search assistant ^[2].

The change was not only a new name: the upgrade bundled a set of new features into the app. These included rich-media search, multimodal input, text and image creation, highly realistic digital humans, a memory function, and a free subscription feature ^[1].

Key details

Alongside the relaunch, Baidu made access to ERNIE 4.0, which had previously been a paid service, free to all users for the rest of that month ^[1].

At a launch event in Beijing, Xue Su, Baidu's vice-president and head of AI innovation business, framed the release around search quality: "With new technologies, we are able to make search smarter and more convenient." ^[3]

The feature list points in two directions at once. Rich-media search and multimodal input keep the app anchored in question answering, while text and image creation, digital humans, memory and a subscription option push it toward being a general-purpose assistant that remembers context and produces content, not just retrieves it ^[1].

Why it matters

The rename marked a shift in how Baidu presented the product. Rather than leading with the underlying model, the company led with search, an activity that Chinese users already perform at very large scale and that Baidu's existing products are built around ^[1][2][3]. The Chinese name 文小言 also moved the app away from the ERNIE branding used for the model family.

The timing is part of the story. In the Chinese consumer AI app market of that period, ERNIE Bot was the second-most popular app behind Doubao ^[3], and the app already hosted a large collection of user-built agents ^[3]. A relaunch built around search, free access to the top model tier for a limited period, and creative tools reads as an attempt to distinguish the product from rivals in a crowded field ^[1][3].