ByteDance, parent TikTok has built the most popular AI chatbot in China: Doubao. The app, launched in 2023, topped the country’s generative artificial intelligence market, reaching more than 157 million monthly vigorous users by August, according to Chinese analytics firm QuestMobile.
But what is less known is that Doubao also has a foreign counterpart: Cici. It was released around the same time and features an almost identical cartoon avatar as the app icon, except that Cici has longer hair than Doubao. The app is region-locked and is not available in either China or the United States, which explains why it is even less well-known than Doubao.
But ByteDance is quietly selling Cici to users in the UK, Mexico and several Southeast Asian countries. Meta’s ad library shows that in October, Cici aired more than 400 different ads in Mexico, most of which boasted about the model’s ability to solve math problems and the fact that it was completely free to operate. He also currently runs advertising campaigns in the UK and the Philippines. On TikTok, creators from these countries have shared dozens of sponsored videos about Cicia, using hashtags such as #ciciai.
Thanks to this marketing push, downloads of the Cici app have recently increased noticeably. In markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico and the United Kingdom, the app has made it to the top 20 most downloaded free apps on the Google Play Store over the past three months, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market research firm. In Mexico, for example, Cici was the most downloaded free app on the Google Play Store for the past week. On Thursday in the UK, Cici was the ninth most popular free app on the Apple App Store.
Cici makes almost no mention of its relationship with ByteDance anywhere in the app or on its website, but the Chinese company has previously confirmed that it controls the apps to Forbes in 2024. According to Cici privacy policy disclosureis based on technology from several other ByteDance-owned platforms, such as photo editor PicPic and coding assistant Coze. But when it comes to text generation, it uses OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini, not ByteDance’s proprietary enormous language models. (ByteDance did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
The appearance of Cici’s mobile app also looks identical to Doubao. Users can talk to the AI via text or audio, generate and analyze images, and try out autonomous agents generated by other users. However, Cici is less advanced than Doubao when it comes to multimodal and social features: there is no ability to generate music and video content, and users cannot share their creations directly on the platform.
Since TikTok launched, ByteDance has been trying to create another app with the same global impact. Cici’s international influence is still far from Doubao’s domestic dominance, but it shows that the company is steadily gaining ground and is willing to spend money on acquiring fresh users. But without China’s internet regulations blocking competition from Western AI players, ByteDance will face OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.