How ByteDance Made China’s Most Widespread AI Chatbot

When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek grew to become a world sensation in January, it not solely shocked Silicon Valley but in addition startled ByteDance, TikTok’s guardian firm. The Chinese language tech large had already launched Doubao, its personal flagship AI assistant app with tens of thousands and thousands of customers. However when DeepSeek grew to become the best-known Chinese language AI firm in a single day, nobody was speaking about Doubao anymore.

Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained the throne as the most well-liked AI app in China with over 157 million month-to-month lively customers, in keeping with QuestMobile, a Chinese language knowledge intelligence supplier. DeepSeek, with 143 million month-to-month lively customers, slipped to second place. The identical month, enterprise capital agency a16z additionally ranked Doubao because the fourth-most-popular generative AI app globally, simply behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Doubao, which launched in 2023, was intentionally designed to be personable. In contrast to hottest AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon encompasses a human-looking avatar—a feminine cartoon character with a brief bob that greets individuals after they open the app for the primary time. The title Doubao actually interprets to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a consumer would give to an intimate good friend,” ByteDance vp Alex Zhu mentioned in a public speech in 2024.

In comparison with Western AI apps, “there is a hotter, extra welcoming really feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for instance, seems like a device you open to finish a activity after which shut once more. Doubao has extra options and a extra colourful consumer interface that retains you longer.”

The Every thing App

Doubao presents customers just a little little bit of every part—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It may chat through textual content, audio, and video; it may generate photographs, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second movies; it permits anybody to customise an AI agent for particular situations and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to make use of. One of the vital essential issues in regards to the app, nonetheless, is that it’s deeply built-in with Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok, permitting it to each entice customers from the video platform and ship visitors again to it.

In some way, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling technique for Doubao has turned out to be precisely what Chinese language customers wished. A little bit over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly develop into the AI app that Chinese language individuals—notably those that aren’t very AI savvy—are literally utilizing. However it has nearly no title recognition within the West.

“It is marketed at people who find themselves not essentially the most technologically knowledgeable, individuals who could choose voice chat and video interplay over textual content,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a publication about Chinese language tech. “A number of the earliest Doubao customers I heard of have been my mates’ grandmothers and aunties.”