When the Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, shocking not only Silicon Valley, but also 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 China’s best-known AI company overnight, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.
Now, ByteDance has taken revenge. In August, Doubao reclaimed the throne as the most popular AI app in China with more than 157 million monthly active users, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly active users, fell to second place. In the same month, venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao as the fourth most popular generative AI app globally, just behind Google’s ChatGPT and Gemini.
Launched in 2023, Doubao was deliberately designed to be enjoyable. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon features 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 “bean paste steamed dumpling,” imitating “the nickname a user would give to a close friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a public speech in 2024.
Compared to Western AI applications, “there’s a warmer, more welcoming feel,” says Shanghai-based investor and technologist Dermot McGrath. “ChatGPT, for example, 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 engaged for longer.”
The application of everything
Doubao offers users a little bit of everything: it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot and more in one app. You can chat via text, audio and video; can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts and five-second videos; allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on the Doubao platform for others to use. One of the most important things about the app, however, is that it is deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which allows it to attract users from the video platform and send traffic to it.
In some ways, ByteDance’s ambitious strategy for Doubao has 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, are actually using. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.
“It’s marketed to people who aren’t more technologically savvy, people who may prefer voice chat and video-to-text interaction,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalka newsletter on Chinese technology. “Some of the first Doubao users I heard about were my friends’ grandmothers and aunts.”
