When Chinese Ai The startup DeepSeek made a global splash in January, shocking not only Silicon Valley but also ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant has already launched Doubao, its flagship AI assistant app that has tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the most famous Chinese AI company overnight, no one talked about Dubao anymore.
Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao had reclaimed the throne as the most popular AI app in China with more than 157 million monthly active users, According to Quest Mobilea Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, which has 143 million monthly active users, fell to second place. In the same month, venture capital firm The a16z is also rated Doubao is the fourth most popular generative AI application globally, behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Doubao, which launched in 2023, was intentionally designed to be attractive. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon features a human-looking avatar — a female cartoon character with a short haircut that greets people when they first open the app. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” and it mimics “a nickname a user gives to a close friend,” ByteDance Vice President Alex Chu said in a statement. Public discourse in 2024.
Compared to Western AI applications, “there’s a warmer, more welcoming feeling,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for example, feels like a tool you open to complete a task and then close it again. Doubao has more features and a more colorful user interface that keeps you interested longer.”
The app is everything
Doubao offers users a little bit of everything — ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in one app. He can chat via text, voice, and video messages. It can create images, spreadsheets, collages, podcasts, and five-second videos; It allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on the Doubao platform for others to use. However, one of the most important things about the app is that it is deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, allowing it to attract users from the video platform and bring traffic back to it.
Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitious sprawling strategy for Doubao turned out to be exactly what Chinese users wanted. In just over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI app that Chinese people are already using — especially those without much AI experience. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.
“It’s marketed among people who aren’t the most tech-savvy, people who might prefer voice chat and video interaction over text messaging,” says Erin Chang, a researcher at MIT. Chinatalka Chinese technology newsletter. “Some of the first Doubao users I heard about were my friends’ grandmothers and aunts.”