ERNIE Bot

What is ERNIE Bot?

ERNIE Bot is the generative AI assistant from Baidu, accessible at yiyan.baidu.com and through iOS and Android apps. It answers questions, helps create content and generates images, and it is powered by Baidu's ERNIE family of models.

Key capabilities of ERNIE Bot

• Chat and Q&A: answers questions and holds multi-turn conversations.
• Search-grounded answers: draws on Baidu's search ecosystem for current information.
• Content creation: drafts and edits written content.
• Image generation: creates images from text prompts.
• Long-context understanding: works with longer inputs.
• Developer API: ERNIE models are available to developers through Baidu's Qianfan platform.

How ERNIE Bot works

Consumers use ERNIE Bot through the web app or mobile apps. Developers and enterprises call ERNIE models through Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform, which offers an enterprise API with per-token pricing, plus managed fine-tuning and private deployment options.

Who uses ERNIE Bot?

ERNIE Bot is aimed at individuals who want a Chinese-language-strong AI assistant and at developers and enterprises building on ERNIE models through Qianfan. Access outside mainland China can be harder, since registration on the web app may require a Chinese phone number.

ERNIE Bot pricing

Baidu reported that ERNIE Bot became free to use for individual users from April 1, 2025. API use through Qianfan is billed per token, with rates that depend on the model, and Baidu AI Cloud publishes current rates on its Qianfan console.

ERNIE Bot alternatives

ChatGLM is the assistant from Zhipu AI, another Chinese model provider, so it competes directly in the same market. Claude is Anthropic's assistant with strong English-language and coding performance and wider availability outside China. Gemini is Google's assistant, integrated with Google Workspace and Search. ERNIE Bot differs by being built for the Chinese market and Baidu's ecosystem.