When Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, not only shocking Silicon Valley but also surprising ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant has already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app that is used by tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek overnight became China’s most renowned artificial intelligence company, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.
Now ByteDance has taken revenge. In August, Doubao regained its throne as the most popular AI app in China with over 157 million monthly busy users, by QuestMobileChinese data analytics provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly busy users, dropped to second place. In the same month, a venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao is the fourth most popular artificial intelligence application in the world, behind applications such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Doubao, which will launch in 2023, is intentionally designed to be cordial. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, the Doubao app icon features a human-like avatar – a cartoon character with a brief bob that greets people when they open the app for the first time. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a user would give to a close friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a speech public speaking in 2024.
Compared to Western AI applications, “it’s a warmer and friendlier atmosphere,” says Dermot McGrath, an investor and technologist from Shanghai. “For example, ChatGPT is like a tool you open to complete a task and then close again. Doubao has more features and a more colorful user interface that keeps you interested longer.”
Everything app
Doubao offers users a little bit of everything – like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot and many more in one app. Can talk via text, audio and video; can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts and five-second videos; allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on the Doubao platform for others to exploit. One of the app’s most vital features, however, is that it is deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, so it can both attract users from the video platform and send traffic to it.
Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitiously comprehensive strategy for Doubao turned out to be exactly what Chinese users expected. A little over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI app that Chinese people actually exploit – especially those who are not very familiar with artificial intelligence. But in the West it has almost no recognizable name.
“It is aimed at people who are not the most tech-savvy and who prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaConversationChinese Technology Bulletin. “Some of the first Doubao users I heard about were my friends’ grandmothers and aunts.”