How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

When Chinese A.I The startup went dipsick A global sensation In January, it shocked not only Silicon Valley but also TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. The Chinese tech giant has already launched its own flagship AI assistant app Doubao with several million users. But when dipsic is done most known Overnight, the Chinese AI company, no one was talking about Dubao anymore.

Now, ByteDance has its revenge. By August, Dive also reclaimed the throne as China’s most popular AI app, with over 157 million monthly active users. According to QuestMobileA Chinese data intelligence provider. Dipsik, with 143 million monthly active users, moved into second place. venture capital firm in the same month Also ranked by a16z Doubao ranks as the fourth-most popular generative AI app globally, just behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Doubao, which launched in 2023, was deliberately designed for individuality. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon has a human-looking avatar—a female cartoon character with a small bob that greets people the first time they open the app. The name Dubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” said Alex Zhu, vice president of ByteDance, mimicking “the nickname a user would give to a close friend.” Public Speaking in 2024.

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

Everything app

Doubao offers users something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in a single app. It can chat via text, audio and video; It can create images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts and five-second videos; It allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific situations and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One of the most important aspects of the app is that it is deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, allowing it to both attract users from the video platform and send traffic back to it.

Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitiously expansive strategy for Doubao turned out to be exactly what Chinese users wanted. In the little over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI ​​app that Chinese people—especially those who don’t know much AI—are actually using. But it is almost unknown in the West.

“It is marketed to people who are not the most technologically savvy, who may prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” said Irene Zhang, a researcher. ChinatownA newsletter about Chinese technology. “Some of the earliest Doubao users I heard about were my friends’ grandmothers and aunts.”