With Qwen Office in public beta, I found myself relying even more on WorkBuddy in our teaching group

Just saw the news that Qianwen Office started public beta testing. It's said to integrate three product sets—QoderWork, MuleRun, and Wukong—to fight head-on with Tencent's WorkBuddy. Reports mentioned a data point: as of June, WorkBuddy had 20.97 million monthly visits. On the Qianwen side, user volume is large but per-capita usage is only 17.4 times, indicating many people open it, take a look, and leave.

This "look and leave" phenomenon was also discussed last week by teachers at our school's information center. Their exact words were: Tools aren't afraid of having few functions; they're afraid users don't know what to do with them.

I've used WorkBuddy for three weeks. The deepest takeaway is this—it doesn't help you finish the work; it forces you to think clearly about how to break down the work first. Products like Qianwen Office that integrate three architectures right away definitely have more comprehensive features, but for me, comprehensive doesn't necessarily mean useful.

How I turned a general tool into a teaching group-specific tool

Our teaching group's situation might differ from most. There are six Chinese language teachers in the group; the oldest is fifty-three and usually struggles even with WeChat File Transfer Assistant. When I initially built the teaching group workspace with WorkBuddy, I thought of one thing: make it so everyone can pick it up and use it immediately, no learning required.

First, the needs. Our group submits three things weekly: collective lesson planning records, classroom observation evaluation forms, and homework inspection summaries. Previously, we used Word templates. Teachers filled them out and passed them around. Messy formatting was a minor issue; the biggest hassle was manually changing dates, grade levels, and chapters every time. At mid-term and final exams, digging out semester-long records for data statistics was truly painful.

I broke this process down for WorkBuddy to handle. Specifically, I created a shared folder, built subdirectories by semester inside, and named every document according to the rule "Grade-Level-Unit-Date-Title." Then I set up several fixed processing workflows: converting scanned handwritten classroom observation records uploaded by teachers into text, automatically filing them into folders under the corresponding teacher's name; summarizing weekly lesson planning minutes into a table; and at the end of the term, exporting semester-long homework inspection data into Excel for statistics.

What was the result? After three weeks, four teachers in our group are now using it consistently, and the other two are still adapting. The most obvious change starting last week is that no one asks me anymore, "Should I send this form to you after filling it out?"—they know just tossing it into that folder is enough, and WorkBuddy handles the rest.

On details, handwriting recognition accuracy is roughly seventy percent. Our Chinese teachers write with many connected strokes, so it indeed doesn't reach the level of direct usability. But for archiving and generating search keywords, it's more than sufficient. I tell them sentence by sentence: Don't think about letting it replace you in grading essays; treat it as half a copy-room auntie.

Qianwen Office's "Big and Comprehensive" vs. WorkBuddy "Tightened by Me"

I carefully read the introduction to Qianwen Office's public beta. Honestly, integrating three products and unifying the underlying architecture—I admire that engineering capability. But the problem lies here: its default state is "can do anything," and for most teachers, a general tool that hasn't been configured is just opening it up and not knowing where to click.

I wrote a post on the forum saying that WorkBuddy not acting as a Chinese teacher relieved me. Because it doesn't come in and write lesson plans or grade essays for you right away. It's more like a workbench; you set boundaries and processes for it, and it runs honestly.

Take entering a student essay as an example. Qianwen Office's approach might be: you throw it in, and it directly gives you a polished model essay. WorkBuddy's approach is: first mark typos according to rules I set, then count high-frequency errors, and finally write the results into the class error archive table. One is doing the work for you; the other is assisting. That's the difference.

So my judgment on Qianwen Office is: It suits individual users willing to tinker and have time to study prompts, or enterprises with dedicated IT teams. But for primary school teaching groups like ours, what we need most isn't another all-powerful "Chinese teacher," but an assistant that knows to say, "Teacher, please take another look; I'll just help you file it," after finishing essay grading.

The Analysys report mentioned that WorkBuddy can connect with WeChat, Enterprise WeChat, DingTalk, etc. I can't use Enterprise WeChat at school, but the point about connecting to WeChat groups is considered most practical by our group director. Teachers don't need to install new software specifically; they can toss files into WeChat.

I tested a very practical example on my end. Last Wednesday afternoon during our group's teaching research activity, we evaluated a young teacher's open class. Six people spoke for over forty minutes total. Previously, someone had to specifically take meeting minutes. This time, I recorded audio on my phone. Afterward, I threw it to WorkBuddy to transcribe, segment by speaker, and automatically categorize mentioned issues and suggestions. In about five minutes, a meeting record with responsible persons and deadlines was ready. Qianwen Office can do this scenario too, but it won't know that our school's evaluation habit is "strengths first, then suggestions; suggestions must include one actionable item." These rules were pre-configured by me into WorkBuddy.

The real difficulty of automation isn't technology; it's knowing what you want

Looking back now, what moved me most about WorkBuddy is its "lack of cleverness." It doesn't make decisions for me, but it executes instructions meticulously. It's like an intern who is quick-handed but needs clear directives. And that's exactly what I need—because in teaching, things that are too clever are actually dangerous.

Qianwen Office's public beta is good news. More choices make the market competitive. But as I said in my previous post, AI in education isn't just about making tools smarter; it's about making users clearer about when to hit the brakes. Tools are for support, not for thinking for you.

Advice for peers: Regardless of which tool you use, spend an afternoon breaking down the most repetitive task at hand into steps and writing them down. You'll find that the real barrier isn't that the tool isn't strong enough, but that you haven't figured out what you actually want it to do. Using WorkBuddy for three weeks, the most valuable part wasn't how much time it saved, but that it forced me to reorganize the teaching group's workflow—cutting what needed cutting, merging what needed merging.

Calculated this way, it's worth much more than the time saved.