Alipay's AI assistant Abao handles 200 daily tasks through OPPO's voice agent

Alipay’s AI-powered assistant “Abao” and OPPO’s system-level voice agent “Xiaobu” (Little Bud) now work together. Xiaobu taps into roughly 200 of Abao’s services — paying utility bills, checking housing funds, booking movie tickets, applying for childcare subsidies, even calculating pension projections. All of it starts with a single voice command, no app switching required.

The partnership delivers three standardized capabilities. Simple requests go straight to the service. Multi-step workflows — buying a movie ticket or booking a courier pickup — get delegated to Abao, which handles filtering, form-filling, and scheduling in the background. The user only approves payment or confirms a choice. For sensitive or paid tasks, the system requires user confirmation at critical points.

Users trigger Xiaobu through the phone’s power button, voice wake-up, or a long press on the navigation bar, then speak their request. Xiaobu passes it to Abao, which does the rest. The neat part: if you’re scrolling through Douyin and decide you want to see a movie you just saw a clip of, you can say “Xiaobu, buy me a ticket for X” without leaving the short-video app. The task runs in the background.

This is the first time a cross-vendor, cross-app multi-agent collaboration model has shipped at scale in China. Xiaobu stays on the phone system side — it owns the entry point, scene awareness, and device coordination. Abao operates as the task-completion agent, backed by Alipay’s full service ecosystem, account infrastructure, and payment security system.

Abao uses a proprietary life-services large language model to interpret requests and route them to the right execution path. Direct routing for simple tasks. An interactive UI for tasks that need user input — picking a seat, choosing a delivery option. An automated operation engine for multi-step processes that involve filling forms and placing orders.

Alipay has been laying groundwork for months. In May, it launched an AI payment stack built for agent-to-agent transactions. In June, it shipped the AI-native version of Alipay itself. In early July, it opened an AI platform to third-party developers with standardized integration channels. The OPPO partnership is the first real-world test of what happens when AI agents cross company boundaries instead of living inside their own walled gardens.