When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek turned a world sensation in January, it not solely shocked Silicon Valley but in addition startled ByteDance, TikTok’s mother or father 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 turned 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 energetic customers, in line with QuestMobile, a Chinese language information 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 contains a human-looking avatar—a feminine cartoon character with a brief bob that greets folks once they open the app for the primary time. The identify Doubao actually interprets to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a person would give to an intimate buddy,” 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, looks like a instrument you open to finish a process after which shut once more. Doubao has extra options and a extra colourful person interface that retains you longer.”
The All the things App
Doubao affords customers a little bit little bit of every part—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It might probably chat by way of textual content, audio, and video; it may well generate photos, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second movies; it permits anybody to customise an AI agent for particular eventualities 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 visitors again to it.
By some means, 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 develop into the AI app that Chinese language folks—notably those that aren’t very AI savvy—are literally utilizing. But it surely has nearly no identify recognition within the West.
“It is marketed at people who find themselves not probably the most technologically knowledgeable, individuals who could favor 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 had been my buddies’ grandmothers and aunties.”