ByteDance’s Other AI Chatbot Is Quietly Gaining Traction Around the World

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has built what is currently the most popular AI chatbot in China: Dubai. Launched in 2023, the app has risen to the top of the country's generative AI market, reaching more than 157 million monthly active users by August, according to Chinese analytics firm QuestMobile.

But what is less known is that Doubao also has an overseas counterpart: Cici. It was released around the same time and features an almost identical female cartoon avatar as its app icon, except that Cici's has longer hair than Doubao's. The app is region-locked and not available in China or the United States, which explains why it's even more obscure than Doubao.

But ByteDance has been quietly selling Cici to users in the UK, Mexico and several Southeast Asian countries. Meta's Ad Library shows that Cici ran more than 400 different ads in Mexico in October, most of which boasted about the model's ability to solve math problems and the fact that it is completely free to use. It is also currently running ad campaigns in the UK and the Philippines. On TikTok, creators in those countries have shared dozens of sponsored videos about Cici with hashtags like #ciciai.

Thanks to that marketing push, downloads of the Cici app have seen a noticeable increase recently. In markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico and the United Kingdom, the app has ranked in the top 20 most downloaded free apps in the Google Play Store for the past three months, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. In Mexico, for example, Cici has been the most downloaded free app in the Google Play Store every day for the last week. In the UK, Cici was the ninth most popular free app in Apple's App Store on Thursday.

Cici makes almost no mention of its ties to ByteDance anywhere in the app or on its website, but the Chinese company previously confirmed its control over the apps to Forbes in 2024. According to Cici's privacy policy disclosureit relies on technology from several other platforms owned by ByteDance, such as the photo editor PicPic and code assistant Coze. But when it comes to generating text, it uses OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini – not ByteDance's proprietary large language models. (ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.)

The design of Cici's mobile app also looks identical to Doubao's. Users can chat with the AI ​​using text or audio, generate and analyze images, and test autonomous agents generated by other users. But Cici is less advanced than Doubao when it comes to multi-modal and social functions: It lacks the ability to generate music and video content, and users cannot share their creations directly on the platform.

Since TikTok started, ByteDance has struggled to produce 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 slowly catching up and ready to spend on new user acquisition. But without the Chinese internet rules blocking competition from Western AI players, ByteDance will have to go head-to-head with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.