How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation successful January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but besides startled ByteDance, TikTok’s genitor company. The Chinese tech elephantine had already launched Doubao, its ain flagship AI adjunct app pinch tens of millions of users. But erstwhile DeepSeek became nan best-known Chinese AI institution overnight, nary 1 was talking astir Doubao anymore.

Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained nan throne arsenic nan astir celebrated AI app successful China pinch complete 157 cardinal monthly progressive users, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese information intelligence provider. DeepSeek, pinch 143 cardinal monthly progressive users, slipped to 2nd place. The aforesaid month, task superior patient a16z besides ranked Doubao arsenic nan fourth-most-popular generative AI app globally, conscionable down nan likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Doubao, which launched successful 2023, was deliberately designed to beryllium personable. Unlike astir celebrated AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon features a human-looking avatar—a female animation characteristic pinch a short bob that greets group erstwhile they unfastened nan app for nan first time. The sanction Doubao virtually translates to “steamed bun pinch legume paste,” mimicking “the nickname a personification would springiness to an friendly friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said successful a public reside successful 2024.

Compared to Western AI apps, “there's a warmer, much welcoming feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for example, feels for illustration a instrumentality you unfastened to complete a task and past adjacent again. Doubao has much features and a much colorful personification interface that keeps you willing longer.”

The Everything App

Doubao offers users a small spot of everything—it’s for illustration ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and much successful a azygous app. It tin chat via text, audio, and video; it tin make images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI supplier for circumstantial scenarios and big it connected Doubao’s level for others to use. One of nan astir important things astir nan app, however, is that it’s profoundly integrated pinch Douyin, nan Chinese type of TikTok, allowing it to some pull users from nan video level and nonstop postulation backmost to it.

Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling strategy for Doubao has turned retired to beryllium precisely what Chinese users wanted. A small complete 2 years since its launch, Doubao has softly go nan AI app that Chinese people—particularly those who aren’t very AI savvy—are really using. But it has almost nary sanction nickname successful nan West.

“It's marketed astatine group who are not nan astir technologically informed, group who whitethorn for illustration sound chat and video relationship complete text,” says Irene Zhang, a interrogator astatine ChinaTalk, a newsletter astir Chinese tech. “Some of nan earliest Doubao users I heard of were my friends’ grandmothers and aunties.”