Baidu's free Chinese AI assistant
4.1 Bottom line: ERNIE Bot is a strong chatbots tool, best known for multimodal understanding of text and images. It has a free plan.
ERNIE Bot, known as Wenxin Yiyan in Chinese, is Baidu's assistant built on its ERNIE models for chat, reasoning, and image generation. Baidu made it free to all users in 2025, and it handles multimodal input across text and images. It's one of the most widely used assistants in China.
| Tool | Rating | Free | From | Best known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERNIE Bot (this tool) | 4.1 | Yes | Free | Multimodal understanding of text and images |
 ChatGPT | 4.8 | Yes | $20/mo | Natural-language chat and drafting |
 Claude | 4.7 | Yes | $20/mo | Large context window |
 Perplexity AI | 4.6 | Yes | $20/mo | Cited, sourced answers |
ERNIE Bot is a strong chatbots tool, best known for multimodal understanding of text and images. It offers a free plan.
What makes it different: ERNIE Bot stands out for multimodal understanding of text and images.
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