DingTalk launches A1 Education Edition, an AI recorder that turns lessons into notes, quizzes and feedback

DingTalk released the A1 Education Edition on 10 September — China’s Teachers’ Day — an AI hardware device built for classrooms that strings lesson capture, content structuring, exercise distribution and student feedback into a single loop. The pitch is straightforward: free teachers from the post-class paperwork that eats into the time they could spend teaching.

The device is the education variant of DingTalk A1, the AI recording card Alibaba’s workplace platform first launched in August 2025. Instead of simply transcribing audio, the education version keeps the classroom recording and its transcript, reorganises the lesson into a knowledge structure that is easy to revise from, and syncs it to the student side. A student who misses a point no longer has to scrub back and forth through a recording; the structure, key difficulties and worked examples are all recoverable from the notes.

Teachers can also generate questions in one tap from what was actually taught, then publish the exercise to a whole class, a group or named students. Because the model has sat through the lesson, DingTalk argues, it knows what was covered, what was emphasised and how deep the class went — so the questions track that lesson rather than drifting away from the textbook and the teaching schedule.

Once students answer, results flow back automatically as teaching feedback. Teachers can quickly see which knowledge points the class has not grasped, and where each individual student stands on each point, then adjust the pace of the next lesson and target support accordingly.

Wang Yize, who teaches Western Economics in a programme preparing vocational-college students for undergraduate entry, has used the device since internal testing. He said that after a 90-minute lesson, sorting the content, writing exercises and compiling mistakes used to occupy an entire afternoon; with the A1 Education Edition those tasks now take about 30 minutes. More importantly, feedback no longer requires a wait — what once took two days to aggregate into a picture of class-wide weak points is visible the moment the exercise ends. “A large model doesn’t know you, but A1 is different. After listening to a whole lesson it has enough classroom context to know what I taught and how deep I went, so the questions are more accurate and I feel better about them,” Wang said.

The A1 Education Edition is also integrated with Qwen Office, DingTalk’s AI workspace. Content captured by A1 can be read and invoked there, so the AI can do more than generate notes, exercises and learning feedback around a single lesson — it can chain several lessons together into a long-term context and workflow for teaching research.

The hardware keeps the standard edition’s light, portable design: a 40.8-gram body, 45 hours of continuous recording and 5-to-8-metre high-definition audio pick-up, enough to cover a teacher’s back-to-back classes. DingTalk said A1 took the top sales slot across Tmall, Douyin and JD during this year’s 618 shopping festival and won a German Red Dot design award. A1 has since extended from the standard edition to lawyer, doctor and education versions, with the hardware moving from a single-point recording tool towards being an entry point through which agents capture real-world context and enter professional workflows.

The A1 Education Edition carries an official price of RMB1,099 and will go on sale shortly at DingTalk Education’s Locker flagship store.