WeChat Launches Native AI Assistant 'Xiao Wei' with Deep Integration Across Ecosystem

WeChat AI has finally arrived.

Recently, some users noticed a pair of green eyes suddenly appearing in the top-left corner of the WeChat homepage—this is WeChat’s first native AI assistant, “Xiao Wei.”

At the same time, this green eye will display a small red dot indicating the number of notifications.

It may seem like just another AI assistant entry point, but anyone familiar with WeChat’s recent operations will realize that WeChat hasn’t given a new feature such a prominent entry point in many years.

For over a decade, “who will get WeChat’s primary entry point” has been one of the most classic topics in the internet industry. Some speculated it would be official accounts, others predicted video accounts, and some thought it would be various lifestyle services. Yet to this day, WeChat’s primary entry point has hardly changed at all.

This time, Xiao Wei appears directly on the homepage's main screen and takes over the key position previously held by the right-swipe page.

From the entry point perspective, it is now virtually indistinguishable from a brand-new primary entry. This is therefore the biggest update WeChat has seen in years—truly “epic”—and the clearest statement yet on AI.

Xiao Wei is watching you.

Although Xiao Wei is essentially a set of agent capabilities, WeChat prefers to define it as an AI assistant. This positioning aligns with Doubao and Qwen—WeChat aims for Xiao Wei to become the AI that users encounter every day.

The key difference lies in the WeChat ecosystem; over a year ago, after WeChat integrated DeepSeek, APPSO speculated that WeChat, leveraging its unique "data-service-social" closed-loop capability, would enable AI to simultaneously access:

• Official account professional content (literature search)
• Mini Program Service Interface (Hotel Booking)
• Scenario-based demonstration of video channel (product review)
• Community relationship chain (viral propagation)

The features supported by this WeChat AI assistant have essentially validated our earlier vision. Within WeChat’s product logic, technology must serve the overall ecosystem rather than exist as isolated functions. Now, AI has become the new starting point for WeChat’s mission to “connect everything.”

Over the past two days, APPSO also gained access to the gray test and immediately conducted an intensive in-depth experience to thoroughly showcase the details of WeChat’s “epic update”—this may be the most detailed user experience of WeChat’s “Weixiao” available online.

The entry point for WeChat AI is no longer hidden within “Ask a Question” or “Search”; this time, it’s everywhere—every common WeChat scenario now features Xiao Wei.

In addition to accessing it by clicking the green eyes on the homepage, the previously swiped-right “Starred” section, which used to display starred articles, video accounts, and mini-programs via a secondary screen, has now been transformed into a full page—similar to the negative one-screen on mobile phones—serving as the homepage for WeChat AI.

WeChat AI still follows the chat interface logic, with the input field at the bottom just like in a WeChat chat page—“press and hold to convert to text”—allowing you to send text, photos, PDF files, and more.

In the chat window, "Ask Xiao Wei" is positioned in the same location as sending images and video calls. Click the + icon to the right of the input box to see that the previous "Voice Input" option has now been replaced with "Ask Xiao Wei."

In addition, clicking the top-right corner on the official account and video channel will display the “Ask Xiao Wei” option; also, when long-pressing text during a chat or while reading an article, a new “Ask Xiao Wei” feature will appear before “Translate.”

Compared to the previous Yuanbao, you now need to @ it under WeChat Official Account articles or videos, as well as have a separate Yuanbao chat contact. WeChat’s current setup seems intended not to make AI a separate app you need to open, but rather to embed it directly into every part of the experience you already use.

In addition to different entry benefits for Yuanbao, the WeChat AI model has also been upgraded this time.

Initially, we all assumed WeChat would use Tencent’s own large language model, “HunYuan.” However, after Xiao Wei introduced itself, it mentioned that its primary model is WeLM (a Well-read Pre-trained Language Model), with some responses assisted by DeepSeek.

When asked why they didn’t use Qwen, Xiao Wei replied that WeLM is an AI developed internally by the WeChat team and is deeply integrated into the WeChat ecosystem. WeLM and Qwen represent two different technical approaches, and WeLM was deployed earlier within the WeChat ecosystem.

WeLM is a proprietary large language model launched by WeChat in September 2022. Link: welm.weixin.qq.com

Xiao Wei also introduced the tasks she can perform, which indeed align closely with the role of an "AI assistant"—but after experiencing it, we found that her capabilities extend far beyond that.

You can do a variety of things—help you operate mini programs, search for information, play music, write content, analyze files, edit photos, generate images, and even keep you company in conversation. I’m not just a Q&A bot; I’m more like a friend living inside WeChat, ready to lend a hand whenever you need it.

Through conversations, we can naturally use WeChat's native features: sending messages to friends, making audio or video calls, and browsing Moments.

I can finally operate AI to send WeChat messages.

The simplest way to send a message—no need to search through your contacts to find someone. Just say to Xiao Wei, “Send a WeChat message to XXX,” and Xiao Wei will first generate a confirmation card before sending the message exactly as given to the specified contact.

More interestingly, sometimes we just want to express our intent but are too lazy to phrase it ourselves—now we can simply tell Xiao Wei, “I’m taking tomorrow off; please help me draft a compelling reason, organize the wording, and send it to my boss, XXX, on WeChat.”

Xiao Wei will automatically identify our needs, remove filler words and meaningless connectors, and generate structured text that meets our requirements, followed by a corresponding confirmation card.

However, Xiao Wei currently does not support sending messages to multiple groups simultaneously, possibly due to concerns about bulk advertising and risk control.

Similarly, Xiao Wei cannot perform related WeChat settings, such as helping me turn on Video Channels, disable Moments, clean up WeChat storage, delete contacts, or unsubscribe from official accounts—none of these actions can currently be executed.

Regarding delegated operation permissions, WeChat has adopted a more conservative approach to further reduce potential risks to user experience.

You can send messages and also send red packets.

Just like sending a message generates a confirmation card, although you can send red packets to friends, you still need to confirm the payment by visiting the red packet page yourself.

After authorizing Xiao Wei to use WeChat Pay services, Xiao Wei can still access our WeChat Pay statements. It can tally how much I’ve received and sent in red envelopes, and even generate bar charts.

Notably, when accessing critical privacy permissions, such as viewing payment data, Xiao Wei will always display an option for user authorization before proceeding—this also applies to the group chat summary below.

Group chat summary

To summarize group chat content using Xiao Wei, simply agree to the terms of use and then click “Ask Xiao Wei” on the group chat page to state your request.

For example, when we ask it to summarize the topics discussed in the group over the past week, Xiao Wei can identify the specific messages from each member and present them in bullet points, showing the group chat history from the past week.

In the topic selection meeting chat group, Xiao Wei was still able to summarize everyone’s topic submissions—this moment made tangible the fact that WeChat is a work tool, not just a messaging app. In the future, bosses might directly ask, “Who posted the most in the group this month?” or “Who submitted the most topics this month?”

Help you post to your Moments

While group chat summaries can be achieved using third-party apps like Yuanbao, summarizing Moments posts is truly something only WeChat's AI can accomplish.

The fact that Moments is now open to AI shows just how significant WeChat’s update is—you can directly search for Moments content within the Xiao Wei chat interface.

Our current tests show that the searchable time range is approximately two days. As with all large models performing text summarization, WeLM performs well, providing accurate summaries of the search results from Moments.

The generated summary also includes a small [i] box indicating the source; clicking it will take you directly to the Moments feed. For someone like me who doesn’t want to scroll through Moments every day, having Xiao Wei curate the updates helps me stay connected with my friends’ life moments without the social pressure.

This is also probably an interesting way to use AI to boost engagement in your social circle.

Summarize important life milestones from Moments and information related to the World Cup.

WeChat Moments and AI truly complement each other: Moments provides context for AI, while AI can seamlessly return to WeChat—a unique advantage that other AI systems find difficult or nearly impossible to achieve.

The answer that understands you best

Having your Moments as context means that in the past, when we asked AI, we were asking the entire web—like when I wanted to know where to go in Guangzhou this weekend, a regular AI would search the internet. But a WeChat AI will find information from my Moments instead. So now, asking AI has become equivalent to asking the people I know.

It requests a gift recommendation suited to the recipient based on our chat history. Xiao Wei first accesses the relevant skill, then reviews my chat logs. It begins by analyzing the recipient’s profile from the chat history and then recommends gifts such as a coffee machine, pour-over kettle, noise-canceling earplugs, massage device, and thermos based on its impressions.

More personalized shopping recommendations

When we continue to ask it to recommend several aesthetically pleasing pour-over kettles, Xiao Wei will directly suggest purchase links; clicking on these products will take you to the WeChat store.

To some extent, WeChat has become the digital identity of countless citizens; responses based on these memories are likely to understand you better than any AI tool.

AI has been integrated into WeChat’s core features, Moments and chat; features like Official Accounts, Video Channels, and Mini Programs are even more so.

Make WeChat's content ecosystem more long-tail

While testing the WeChat AI for the official account, we found that asking questions about the account’s content is significantly faster than before, with virtually no delay.

More interestingly, Xiao Wei doesn’t just allow you to ask questions about individual articles—you can also interact with the entire official account. For example, when we ask it to find APPSO’s recent articles about Codex, Xiao Wei summarizes the content in one sentence and lists all related articles from APPSO in bullet points.

When we asked Xiao Wei to recommend several AI media accounts worth following, she suggested five, including APPSO, which you can view by clicking directly on their official account profiles. Leveraging WeChat’s content ecosystem, Xiao Wei truly helps us reduce the cost of information discovery and quickly find content we’re interested in.

Even AI-generated images can be used for betting.

Like a general chat assistant, we can also use Xiao Wei for AI image generation. The image editing results, whether fixing blur or removing bystanders, are quite impressive, and all generated images include a visible "AI-generated" watermark.

When asked which image generation model was used, Xiao Wei said it was also WeLM.

You can upload images by selecting them directly from your phone or by taking a photo with your camera, and uploading files allows Xiao Wei to handle even richer content.

We uploaded a PDF of a research paper and asked it to summarize the paper’s key points. It can only be said that, today, large language models have reached a masterful level in handling text-based tasks—and Xiao Wei is no exception.

After the experience of using WeChat to search and ask questions through Xiaowei became smoother, a noticeable change is that users often no longer bother switching to third-party general AI services, leaving new challenges for competitors.

Bookmarks can also serve as a knowledge base.

WeChat goes one step further by allowing you to directly save these summaries to your WeChat collections.

However, currently Xiao Wei can only read notes it has created itself and does not have permission to access content previously saved in WeChat favorites.

Have AI organize your to-do list

In addition to creating notes, we also found that Xiao Wei can create to-do lists and automatically set reminders.

Like the additional suggestions under the to-do list, Xiao Wei is a personalized AI assistant. After enabling "Memory" and "Personalized Services" in settings, Xiao Wei will remember our preferences, habits, and anything we ask it to remember.

For example, when we open Xiao Wei, its recommendations include personalized content such as “What songs my friends are listening to,” “McDonald’s,” and “Doctors using DouBao AI to make mistakes.”

Like Alipay AI, WeChat AI can also easily access mini-programs to complete everyday services.

WeChat Mini Programs can be launched according to our needs to perform common services such as making medical appointments, buying coffee, displaying boarding passes, and booking museum visits.

Features like ordering through a mini-program are already quite common; we’ve previously implemented similar functionality with Alipay AI. For unlogged users, the first use prompts them to log in before proceeding with any actions.

Unlike Alipay, Xiao Wei does not display the interface showing the mini-program operation process; it hides the steps that require active user clicks.

We don’t need to watch the AI use screen recognition to find where to click—Xiao Wei skips directly to the final step, so after placing our order, we only need to complete the payment.

However, recently WeChat launched an AI-specific card, so perhaps in the future under certain conditions, AI could even complete the payment process entirely.

We also tried using it to hail a ride—it was able to launch the ride-hailing mini-program. However, we ultimately couldn’t complete the ride because it couldn’t automatically perform many required actions.

But interestingly, when we initiated the ride-hailing request for the second time, it switched from Didi to Gaode, ultimately achieving an even better result than before.

This thought process is similar to current Agent products, like Codex solving problems on its own. Xiao Wei will reflect on issues encountered during previous tasks and consider whether there’s a better way to fulfill the user’s needs next time.

Although the current usage scenarios for mini-programs are limited, it is only a matter of time before we can manage the entire mini-program ecosystem through WeChat, as these third-party mini-programs open up more APIs.

Recently, celebrities like Hu Yanbin and Wu Qian have started engaging in Vibe Coding, and WeChat AI aims to help 1.4 billion people begin creating their own tools through this platform.

This is the most imaginative feature of WeChat Mini Programs—allowing you to create a small tool directly within WeChat with just a single sentence.

In the micro settings, locate the widget section to access the widget generation page; the final generated widget will open as a mini-program.

There is currently a limit on the number of widgets you can create. If you need to create more than five, you must first delete existing ones before creating new ones. This feature is best suited for simple use cases, such as creating a lottery widget or other basic applications.

We generated several mini-programs, including a lined notebook, a running tracker, "What's for Lunch Today," and a Mario-style game logger. None of these mini-programs feature the common AI coding gradient purple, but it’s still clear they’re built using a shared template.

After all, if the backend code of the mini-program is also used for model training, directly applying our requirements to a general template is the least error-prone approach.

Here’s an interesting point: the tool cannot create mini-games. When we requested generating a Mario-style mini-game, Xiao Wei replied that generating the actual game is not currently supported.

Unfortunately, the widget generated cannot be shared with other users or modified afterward. If you're not satisfied, you'll need to create a new one.

In the past, mini-programs were created by developers and left there for us to find and use. Now, as long as you're a WeChat user, just say one sentence, and a mini-program will be created specifically for your need.

This小程序, officially launched in 2017, has evolved over nearly a decade from merely an "app" into a capability we can summon effortlessly.

Over the past three years, the narrative in the AI industry has been that brute force delivers miracles, continuously creating more powerful AI and pushing the boundaries of intelligence.

Thus, WeChat's restraint has also come to be seen as conservative, but WeChat’s product philosophy has never been about “building the best xxx”—it excels at connection.

WeChat Official Accounts aren’t about becoming the best content platform—they connect people with content. Mini Programs aren’t about becoming the best app store—they connect people with services. Video Channels are the same—they connect people with creators.

WeChat has given its AI assistant a prominent entry point, but the core goal isn't just to secure a ticket on the AI bandwagon—it's that AI has conveniently become the convergence point for all of WeChat's capabilities.

Don’t build new capabilities; build new connections—this is the first principle behind WeChat’s approach to AI.

The pair of eyes in the top-left corner of WeChat are becoming WeChat’s new interaction hub. Behind them lie your social connections, your content consumption, your service needs, and your payment behaviors—things that previously were scattered across different tabs and pages, requiring you to navigate back and forth. Now, they’ve all been consolidated into a single chat interface.

When a national app inevitably needs to take on increasingly complex features, AI can instead streamline its interactions—this, too, is a form of simplicity and elegance.

Of course, WeChat's Xiao Wei hasn't reached godlike status yet—it still has some bugs, some capabilities haven't been fully unleashed, and the model isn't the most powerful. But it is among the few AI systems truly embedded within an ecosystem.

Chat history, Moments, Official Accounts, Video Channels, Mini Programs, WeChat Pay, Favorites, To-Do Lists... these capabilities of the WeChat ecosystem can all be interconnected thanks to AI.

In the past, we opened WeChat to find people, view content, or complete services; in the future, we might first ask Xiao Wei when we open WeChat.

For WeChat, with over a billion users, what it may need isn’t another ChatGPT—but rather integrating AI into every chat, every search, every payment, and every moment a need arises, which could be more valuable.

When Moments, chat histories, mini-programs, and payment systems all begin to serve as context for AI, a truly WeChat-native AI may just be beginning.

This article is from the WeChat official account "APPSO," authored by: Discovering Tomorrow's Products