When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek grew to become a worldwide sensation in January, it not solely shocked Silicon Valley but additionally startled ByteDance, TikTok’s father or mother firm. The Chinese language tech big had already launched Doubao, its personal flagship AI assistant app with tens of tens of millions 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 preferred AI app in China with over 157 million month-to-month energetic customers, in response to QuestMobile, a Chinese language knowledge intelligence supplier. DeepSeek, with 143 million month-to-month energetic 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. Not like 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 pal,” ByteDance vice chairman Alex Zhu stated 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 software you open to finish a job after which shut once more. Doubao has extra options and a extra colourful consumer interface that retains you longer.”
The The whole lot App
Doubao provides customers just a little little bit of the whole lot—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It may chat by way of textual content, audio, and video; it could generate pictures, 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. Probably the most necessary issues concerning 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 site visitors again to it.
In some way, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling technique for Doubao has turned out to be precisely what Chinese language customers needed. Somewhat over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly turn into the AI app that Chinese language individuals—notably those that aren’t very AI savvy—are literally utilizing. Nevertheless it has virtually no title recognition within the West.
“It is marketed at people who find themselves not essentially the most technologically knowledgeable, individuals who could want voice chat and video interplay over textual content,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a e-newsletter about Chinese language tech. “A few of the earliest Doubao customers I heard of have been my mates’ grandmothers and aunties.”
