When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek turned a worldwide sensation in January, it not solely shocked Silicon Valley but additionally startled ByteDance, TikTok’s mother or father firm. The Chinese language tech big 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 lively customers, in accordance with QuestMobile, a Chinese language information 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. Not like hottest AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon incorporates 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 identify Doubao actually interprets to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a person 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 device 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 Every thing App
Doubao affords customers somewhat little bit of all the pieces—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It might chat by way of textual content, audio, and video; it could actually 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. One of the crucial essential issues in regards to the app, nevertheless, 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 needed. Slightly over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly change into the AI app that Chinese language individuals—notably those that aren’t very AI savvy—are literally utilizing. Nevertheless it has virtually no identify recognition within the West.
“It is marketed at people who find themselves not probably the most technologically knowledgeable, individuals who might favor voice chat and video interplay over textual content,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a publication about Chinese language tech. “Among the earliest Doubao customers I heard of have been my pals’ grandmothers and aunties.”
