Alibaba will let you find restaurants and order food with voice in a car – TechCrunch

Internet competition in China has for years been about who controls your mobile apps. Nowadays, giants are turning more and more to offline scenarios, including what's happening behind the dash of your car.

Alibaba announced Tuesday at the Shanghai Auto Show that it was developing connected car applications that will allow drivers to find restaurants, queue up, make reservations at restaurants, order meal and perform a multitude of other tasks using voice command, touch control. Third party developers are invited to create their embedded applications, which will run on Alibaba's operating system, AliOS.

Rather than functioning as stand-alone applications, these embedded services come in the form of "mini-applications", smaller than the others, in exchange for faster access and a smaller file size, in Alibaba's all-in-one digital wallet, Alipay . Alibaba has other "super applications" in its ecosystem, such as Taobao market place and the AutoNavi navigation service, but the payment solution is clearly more profitable if Alibaba wants people to spend more while sitting on four wheels.

Alibaba has no specific timetable for the official launch of embedded mini-applications, but it is already considering a launch, said a spokesman for the company at TechCrunch.

Creating lightweight applications is a popular strategy for Chinese Internet giants that exploit super applications hosting external applications, or "mini-applications"; In this way, users rarely need to leave their ecosystems. These lightweight applications are known to be easier and cheaper to create than native applications, although developers have to make concessions like giving their hosts some level of access to user data and following the rules as they do. would do with Apple's App Store. According to Alibaba, there will be "specific examination criteria for safety and control" tailored to the automotive sector.

Photo source: Alibaba

The relocation of Alibaba demonstrates increased competition for the control of the operating system of connected new generation cars. For those who wonder if the online trading giant will manufacture its own cars as it is an aggressive infiltration into the physical space, such as when opening its own Hema supermarket chain, the The company's solution to the vehicles seems to be at least software, for the moment.

In 2017, Alibaba renamed its operating system with a deep desire to make AliOS an automotive partner. To achieve this goal, Alibaba has also created a joint venture, Banma Network, with state-owned manufacturers SAIC Motor and Dongfeng Peugeot Citroen, a French company of the French car manufacturer, aiming at integrating and integrating AliOS solutions with customers in the sector. Last August, 700,000 SAIC vehicles equipped with the AliOS system were sold.

Alibaba Tencent and Baidu competitors also drove in the automotive field, although by slightly different roads. Baidu began by leveraging stand-alone driving and built an Android-based developer platform for automakers. The futuristic plan is far from being commercially successful, but it has become a major driver of autonomous driving with the highest number of kilometers driven in Beijing, the hub of the test of autonomous cars. Tencent's car initiatives seem more nebulous. Like Baidu, she tests self-driving and, like Alibaba, she collaborates with industry veterans to make cars, but it's unclear what's the benefit for the giant of the social media and gaming in the automotive sector.