How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

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When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shook Silicon Valley, but also shocked ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best known Chinese AI company overnight, no one talks about Doubao anymore.

Now ByteDance got its revenge. By August, Doubao reclaimed the throne as the most popular AI app in China with over 157 million monthly active users, according to QuestMobilea Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly active users, slipped to second place. The same month, venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao as the fourth-most popular generative AI app worldwide, just behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

Doubao, which launched in 2023, was intentionally designed to be personal. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao's app icon has a human-looking avatar — a female cartoon character with a short bob that greets people when they first open the app. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” which mimics “the nickname a user would give to an intimate friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a public speech in 2024.

Compared to Western AI apps, “there's a warmer, more welcoming feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “For example, ChatGPT feels like a tool that 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.”

The Everything App

Doubao offers users a little bit of everything – it's like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in one app. It can chat via text, audio and video; it can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on Doubao's 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, which allows it to both attract users from the video platform and send traffic back to it.

Somehow, ByteDance's ambitious expansion strategy for Doubao turned out to be exactly what Chinese users wanted. A little over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI ​​app that Chinese people—especially those who aren't very AI savvy—actually use. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.

“It's marketed to people who aren't the most technologically savvy, people who might prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalka newsletter about Chinese tech. “Some of the earliest Doubao users I heard of were my friends' grandmothers and aunts.”



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