How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.

Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained the throne as the most popular AI app in China with over 157 million monthly active users, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly active users, slipped to second place. The same month, venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao 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 to be personable. 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 open the app for the first time. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a user would give to an intimate friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a public speech in 2024.

Compared to Western AI apps, “there’s a warmer, more welcoming feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for example, 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.”

The Everything App

Doubao offers users a little bit of everything—it’s 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 generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One of the most important things about the app, however, is that it’s 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 sprawling 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—particularly those who aren’t very AI savvy—are actually using. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.

“It’s marketed at people who are not the most technologically informed, people who may prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a newsletter about Chinese tech. “Some of the earliest Doubao users I heard of were my friends’ grandmothers and aunties.”