When Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek turned a global sensation in January, it not solely shocked Silicon Valley but in addition startled ByteDance, TikTok’s father or mother firm. The Chinese language tech big had already launched Doubao, its personal flagship AI assistant app with tens of thousands and thousands of customers. However when DeepSeek turned the best-known Chinese language AI firm in a single day, nobody was speaking about Doubao anymore.
Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained the throne as the hottest AI app in China with over 157 million month-to-month lively customers, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese language information intelligence supplier. DeepSeek, with 143 million month-to-month lively customers, slipped to second place. The identical month, enterprise capital agency a16z also ranked Doubao as the fourth-most-popular generative AI app globally, simply behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Doubao, which launched in 2023, was intentionally designed to be personable. In contrast to hottest AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon incorporates a human-looking avatar—a feminine cartoon character with a brief bob that greets individuals once they open the app for the first time. The identify Doubao actually interprets to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a person would give to an intimate pal,” ByteDance vp Alex Zhu mentioned in a public speech in 2024.
In contrast to Western AI apps, “there is a hotter, extra welcoming really feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for instance, seems like a instrument you open to full a process after which shut once more. Doubao has extra options and a extra colourful person interface that retains you longer.”
The Every thing App
Doubao gives customers a bit little bit of the whole lot—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and extra in a single app. It may chat through textual content, audio, and video; it may possibly generate photographs, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second movies; it permits anybody to customise an AI agent for particular eventualities and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One in every of the most vital issues about the app, nevertheless, is that it’s deeply built-in with Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok, permitting it to each entice customers from the video platform and ship site visitors again to it.
Someway, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling technique for Doubao has turned out to be precisely what Chinese language customers wished. Slightly over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly develop into the AI app that Chinese language individuals—notably those that aren’t very AI savvy—are really utilizing. However it has virtually no identify recognition in the West.
“It is marketed at individuals who are not the most technologically knowledgeable, individuals who might want voice chat and video interplay over textual content,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a e-newsletter about Chinese language tech. “A few of the earliest Doubao customers I heard of had been my mates’ grandmothers and aunties.”
Disclaimer: This article is sourced from external platforms. OverBeta has not independently verified the information. Readers are advised to verify details before relying on them.
