Ant Group Launches AQ: An AI-Powered Health Assistant with Over 100 Features Including Medical Consultation, Report Interpretation, and Personal Health Records

Ant Group is accelerating its push into AI-driven healthcare, with the official launch of its new AI health application, “AQ,” on June 26. Addressing the public’s essential needs for medical consultation and pain points in health management, AQ offers over 100 AI-powered features, including health education, consultation services, medical report interpretation, and personal health records. It also efficiently connects users to professional medical resources across China, including more than 5,000 hospitals, nearly one million doctors, and close to 200 AI avatars of renowned physicians. The app is currently being rolled out on major app stores.

At the press conference, Ant Group stated, “Through AQ, Ant aims to provide everyone with a trustworthy health steward, creating a personal assistant for public health and a reliable aid for inclusive healthcare, bringing every Chinese citizen one step closer to a healthy life.”

Public information indicates that nearly 75% of the Chinese population is affected by suboptimal health conditions, making it crucial to promote national health management. However, accessible tools for the general public remain limited: over 200 million online searches related to health issues are conducted daily, yet the results are often cluttered with misleading advertisements and content of questionable authenticity. There is an urgent need for more professional medical and health information and services.

To help address this challenge, Ant AQ has been launched. Zhang Junjie, Vice President of Ant Group, introduced that the “AI Health Assistant,” which debuted on Alipay last September, has already served over 70 million users. After nearly ten months of continuous refinement, the newly released standalone app, AQ, features three key advantages: “more professional Q&A, more comprehensive services, and a deeper understanding of your health.”

When consulting about medical conditions, most people struggle to accurately describe their symptoms. AQ, powered by Ant Group’s large healthcare language model, can mimic real physicians by asking follow-up questions, guiding users step-by-step to provide necessary information, and ultimately delivering more accurate and comprehensive health advice. For complex reports, skin issues, medication packaging, or medical records, users can also submit photos for inquiry. Taking skin photo consultations as an example, AQ, equipped with a visual-language recognition system featuring hundreds of billions of parameters, can precisely identify 50 common skin diseases and provide corresponding health recommendations.

To help users select the right hospitals and find suitable doctors, AQ has connected with over 5,000 public hospitals across China and nearly one million physicians available for appointment booking or online consultations. Users submit their needs, and AI provides matching services. Additionally, more than 200 hospitals nationwide offer cloud-based medical escort services on AQ, where AI acts as a guide for patients during offline medical visits.

Notably, the teams led by Academician Liao Wanqing, a dermatology expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Academician Wang Jun, a thoracic surgery expert, together with nearly 200 renowned physicians from top-tier (Grade 3A) hospitals across China, have launched their “AI Avatars” on AQ. These avatars provide 24/7 virtual consultations to answer user inquiries. To facilitate use by older adults, AQ has also incorporated voice call functionality into services such as the AI Avatars of renowned physicians, enabling seniors to easily seek health advice simply by speaking.

To address health management needs, AQ offers personalized health record services that document medical visits, medication usage, exercise, and dietary habits. Meanwhile, AQ has partnered with health management device manufacturers such as Yuwell and Sinocare, and integrated with wearable devices from vivo, Huawei, and Apple, enabling it to provide tailored health recommendations based on data such as blood glucose levels, sleep patterns, and physical activity. Yuwell Medical has pioneered the launch of AI agents like “An Nai Tang” and “Respiratory Care Manager” on AQ, leveraging AI to help chronic disease patients manage their health.

Behind AQ’s emergence as a health steward lies a robust technological foundation, along with the deep involvement of thousands of medical professionals across China.

According to reports, AQ’s technical engine, the Ant Medical Large Language Model, has been trained on over a trillion tokens of specialized medical corpus. It not only possesses “medical thinking” reasoning capabilities but also supports multimodal interactions involving images, speech, and video, achieving industry-leading performance in authoritative domestic and international benchmarks such as HealthBench and MedBench. Furthermore, the model integrates Ant Group’s technological advantages in privacy, security, and risk control, becoming the first in the industry to pass the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s (CAICT) trusted evaluation for large healthcare models in both domains, thereby earning the highest rating in security assessment.

Professional physicians serve as the best “teachers” for AQ. It is understood that each physician AI agent on AQ must undergo rigorous training and evaluation by doctors and their teams before being deployed to provide services to users. Furthermore, leading specialists from various disciplines at more than ten top-tier Grade A tertiary hospitals across China have formed a professional advisory board, deeply participating in tasks such as the evaluation of specialty-specific Q&A on AQ.

Doctors Enhance AI’s Professionalism, While AI Extends Doctors’ Service Capabilities. Mao Hongjing, Chief Physician and Vice President of Hangzhou Seventh People’s Hospital, is among the first batch of physicians to launch an AI digital twin. His intelligent agent was developed based on a vast amount of high-quality clinical data, along with over 50,000 popular science articles and academic papers. Dr. Mao stated that previously he could see an average of only 600 patients per month, but now, through his “AI digital twin,” he can serve more than 110,000 people in a single day, expanding his service reach from within Zhejiang Province to across China.

Zhang Junjie stated, “AQ is not only an entry point for medical and health services but also a platform connecting doctors, healthcare institutions, and users. We will continue to expand openness, collaborate with more partners, and support affordable healthcare and public health.”

“Health management is a public welfare initiative that requires the participation of more stakeholders leveraging their respective strengths,” said Chen Huashan, Secretary-General of the Center for AI Research Promotion at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “China currently has a large population suffering from chronic diseases, placing significant pressure on the healthcare system. The emergence of products like AQ helps bridge the resource gap, optimize resource allocation, and support inclusive healthcare.”