Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot)
Baidu's free ERNIE-powered assistant, which absorbed the Ernie Bot site in 2026
Overview
Wenxin Assistant (百度文心助手) is Baidu's consumer AI assistant and, since July 2026, the home of what was the Ernie Bot (文心一言) website. It runs on Baidu's ERNIE models for chat, search, writing, images and multi-step tasks, and Baidu says every feature is free. Developers reach ERNIE 5.1 and 5.0 through the paid Qianfan API.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 19 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- All features free, per Baidu
- Task Engine 2.0 multi-step tasks
- ¥6 in / ¥22 out per million for prompts of 32K to 128K
- ¥10 in / ¥40 out per million above 32K
- Thinking variants billed at the same rates
What you can produce with Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot)
- Free AI chat, search answers and writing help, strongest in Chinese
- Multi-step tasks such as research reports and slide decks via Task Engine 2.0, on a schedule or trigger
- Image creation and AI reading of documents
- ERNIE 5.1 and 5.0 through the pay-as-you-go Qianfan API, compatible with the OpenAI SDK
- Open ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE-Image weights under Apache 2.0 for self-hosting
Wenxin Assistant gives individuals free access to Baidu's current ERNIE models with search built in, and Task Engine 2.0 makes it more of an agent than a chatbot. ERNIE 5.0 and 5.1 have ranked first among Chinese models on LMArena, and the Qianfan API is inexpensive and works with the OpenAI SDK.
It is a Chinese-market product: the interface and strengths are Chinese, content follows China's rules, and the rebranding from Ernie Bot has been confusing. ASEAN developers may find the Qianfan API workable; the consumer assistant matters mainly to Chinese speakers.
What we found
Ernie Bot (文心一言), Baidu's answer to ChatGPT, launched in March 2023 and no longer exists under that name on the web. On 25 June 2026 Baidu replaced the Ernie Bot website's question box, gave users until 25 July to download conversations, saved prompts and memory data, and moved the service on 26 July to Baidu's Wenxin site, now titled Baidu Wenxin Assistant (百度文心助手). Paid memberships had already ended: Baidu stopped selling them on 13 February 2025 and offers pro-rata refunds on older orders. This page now covers Wenxin Assistant, which also sits inside the Baidu app.
Baidu says every Wenxin Assistant feature is free. At an AI Day on 20 August 2026 it added Task Engine 2.0, which plans and carries out multi-step jobs such as research reports and slide decks, and can run on a schedule or a trigger. Baidu cited first place on the PinchBench v2 and SuperCLUE agent rankings and said daily users in June were 83% higher than a year earlier; those claims are Baidu's. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2026, citing unnamed sources, that the assistant had passed 200 million monthly users.
Underneath is ERNIE. ERNIE 5.0, officially released in January 2026, is a 2.4-trillion-parameter model spanning text, images, audio and video, and ranked first among Chinese models and eighth overall on LMArena's text leaderboard that month. ERNIE 5.1 followed in May with about a third of the parameters, which Baidu says took 6% of the usual pre-training cost, and placed fourth on LMArena's search leaderboard. Neither has public weights, so the cost claim cannot be checked; the older ERNIE 4.5 family and the ERNIE-Image model are on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0.
Developers pay through Baidu's Qianfan platform, which works with the OpenAI SDK: ERNIE 5.1 costs ¥4 per million input tokens and ¥18 per million output for prompts up to 32K. The assistant is built for Chinese users and operates under China's generative-AI rules, so expect politically sensitive topics to be off limits.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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