When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek grew to become a international 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 preferred AI app in China with over 157 million month-to-month lively customers, in line 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 encompasses a human-looking avatar—a feminine cartoon character with a brief bob that greets individuals once they open the app for the primary time. The title Doubao actually interprets to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a person 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, appears 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 gives customers a little bit little bit of every little thing—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It will probably chat by way of textual content, audio, and video; it might probably generate pictures, 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. One of the vital essential issues concerning the app, nevertheless, is that it’s deeply built-in with Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok, permitting it to each appeal to customers from the video platform and ship site visitors again to it.
One way or the other, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling technique for Doubao has turned out to be precisely what Chinese language customers needed. A little bit over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly develop into the AI app that Chinese language individuals—significantly those that aren’t very AI savvy—are literally utilizing. But it surely 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 publication about Chinese language tech. “A number of the earliest Doubao customers I heard of had been my buddies’ grandmothers and aunties.”