Baidu wants its AI agent to run your home

Baidu launched four Xiaodu devices at its AI Day event in Beijing. The company has connected its Baidu Dazi agent platform to all of them. The four are:

1. Xiaodu Smart Screen X9 Ultra,
2. the Xiaodu Smart Camera C1500,
3. the Xiaodu Tiantian companion screen Ultra and
4. the Xiaodu Smart Speaker Pro Max.

Xiaodu is Baidu’s home hardware brand in China, and it sells smart speakers, smart displays and cameras. Baidu Dazi is Baidu’s agent platform, which launched on 22 March 2026 and is built on the company’s Ernie model. It reads a request, plans the task, does the work and reports back with the result. Until this week it lived on the desktop and in the app, where it had 6.74 million monthly active users in July 2026, second among Chinese AI office agents, from a small starting base.

What the agents do in the house

The family schedule agent is the clearest of them. A parent sends a WeChat message, a voice note or a file to the smart screen at home, something like “homework from 6 to 8pm tonight” or “swimming class moves to 7pm tomorrow”. The agent turns that into a task on the home screen, checks it against what is already booked, flags a clash, pushes the task to the other Xiaodu devices in the house, and sends a completion record back to the parent’s WeChat.

• The C1500 camera runs a second-generation monitoring agent with care tasks you define yourself and reminders that escalate in stages.
• The X9 Ultra has a motorised camera that turns to follow movement it detects outside its field of view, records at 1080p, and adds a mode for older users that recognises 15 Chinese dialects.
• The Speaker Pro Max gets long-term memory, controls other appliances, and uses built-in temperature, humidity and light sensors to adjust them without being asked.
• The Tiantian Ultra is a 32-inch 4K portable touchscreen with a 15,000 mAh battery rated at 12 hours of video, and it runs homework help, about 1,500 fitness classes and a whiteboard.

Li Ying, vice-president of Baidu Group and chief executive of Xiaodu Technology, put it this way: home AI deals with “multiple family members, multiple devices, multiple spaces, multiple scenarios and continuously running complex tasks”.

The prices

• Xiaodu Tiantian companion screen Ultra: about KES 107,000.
• Xiaodu Smart Screen X9 Ultra: about KES 12,100.
• Xiaodu Smart Camera C1500, zoom triple-camera version: about KES 7,400.
• Xiaodu Smart Speaker Pro Max: about KES 6,700.

Xiaodu is in more than 55 million households, on Baidu’s own count. When it launched the Chaoneng Xiaodu assistant in November 2025, it pushed a free upgrade to tens of millions of devices already sitting in people’s homes.

Not on sale here

None of these devices are sold in Kenya. Xiaodu hardware sells in China, and Baidu did not announce a market outside it. The pattern is one we have watched on phones all year, as agents moved off the chat window and onto devices: TECNO put an agent on its phones in April and gave it control of apps in June. Baidu is doing the same thing to the speaker, the screens and the camera, which is a harder problem, because a home agent has to hold a shared calendar for several people and act on it without being asked twice.

A camera that decides on its own when to escalate a reminder is making a judgement about your household. Baidu did not give a retention period for that footage or for the family schedules it will now hold.