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Ben Jiang

Tencent Holdings’ WeChat is already the undisputed super-app for over a billion people in China, handling everything from splitting dinner bills to hailing taxis. Now, Tencent is embedding an artificial intelligence agent named Xiaowei into the platform, adding a hands-free, automated assistant to its vast digital ecosystem.
In its latest earnings results announced on Wednesday, Tencent highlighted Xiaowei for the first time, touting its focus on user privacy and inference efficiency.
After gaining early access to the trial feature, which appears as two green dots at the top of the main screen, I spent nearly 24 hours letting Xiaowei run my digital routine. The goal: see how much of my daily life an AI agent could actually take over.
The verdict? It’s a fascinating, promising glimpse into the future of apps – and an occasional exercise in frustration.
Beyond chatting: an agent that works
Unlike standard chatbots that simply answer questions, an AI agent is designed to take action. Where a chatbot recommends a hotpot restaurant, Xiaowei is meant to make a reservation and place your order, too.
This is where Tencent holds a major home-field advantage. While rivals like Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen AI app must build connections with external services from scratch, Xiaowei sits directly inside an ecosystem where messaging, payments and millions of mini-programs have already coexisted for years.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
In my testing, Xiaowei handled some tasks smoothly. It successfully helped me send messages to specific recipients, initiated audio calls, set up reminders and pulled in information from across WeChat.
When asked to order food through mini-programs, Xiaowei navigated the multi-step process independently, leaving me with only the final tap to confirm and pay.

Slow speeds and misheard names
Despite those bright spots, Xiaowei is not quite ready to replace my thumbs.
Navigating through mini-program menus took long enough that, for routine tasks like ordering a favourite meal, doing it manually was still faster.
Trying to place a WeChat voice call to a friend with a phonetically similar name to another person turned into a loop of failed attempts, as Xiaowei struggled to pick the right contact from my list despite multiple nudges.
Xiaowei also offers an “AI-assisted writing” function for its WeChat Moments mini-blog, but automated social posts have already drawn backlash from early users who worry that generative text dilutes real human connection.
For the record, Xiaowei is supported by WeLM, an in-house AI model developed by the WeChat team, rather than Tencent’s flagship Hy3 foundational model.
According to a social-media post by the WeChat team that unveiled WeLM, it is a family of AI models with two different parameter sizes: 80 billion and 617 billion.
The bottom line
Xiaowei is far from a fully autonomous assistant. It remains constrained by the familiar hurdles facing consumer AI agents: sluggish execution, errors in precision and the need for human supervision.
Yet, Tencent’s real edge may not be Xiaowei’s current intelligence.
Very few AI developers control a digital space where social networking, payments and daily services are already so deeply intertwined. Xiaowei may be clunky today, but it is standing on the ultimate launch pad.


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The new Xiaowei agent promises hands-free control across WeChat’s vast digital ecosystem. I set out to see whether it delivers


The new Xiaowei agent promises hands-free control across WeChat’s vast digital ecosystem. I set out to see whether it delivers.


I gave Tencent’s WeChat AI agent control for 24 hours: where it excelled – and stumbled

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The new Xiaowei agent promises hands-free control across WeChat’s vast digital ecosystem. I set out to see whether it delivers

The new Xiaowei agent promises hands-free control across WeChat’s vast digital ecosystem. I set out to see whether it delivers