Baidu to Offer Free Access to Ernie Bot AI from April 1
百度宣布文心一言免费开放，AI 竞争加剧
Chinese tech giant Baidu announced that its AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, will be free to use starting April 1, as competition intensifies with emerging players like DeepSeek.
Baidu cited continued upgrades and lower inference costs as reasons for making Ernie’s large language models (LLMs) freely accessible on both desktop and mobile platforms. In mainland China, Ernie Bot’s mobile version is branded as “Wenxiaoyan”.
Additionally, Baidu launched “Deep Search”, a feature offering advanced reasoning, planning, and expert-level responses across multiple scenarios. This new function will also be free from April 1.
百度宣布，从 4 月 1 日起，其 AI 聊天机器人 文心一言 将全面 免费 向用户开放，以扩大人工智能技术的可及性。此举正值 AI 竞争加剧，新兴对手如 DeepSeek 正快速崛起。
百度表示，由于 技术升级和推理成本降低，桌面端和移动端用户 都可免费使用其 文心大模型（LLM）。在中国大陆，文心一言的 移动端版本 也称为 “文小言”。
此外，百度还推出了 “深度搜索” 功能，具备更强的 推理、规划和多场景专家级回答能力，该功能同样将于 4 月 1 日起免费开放。
