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.”

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.”

While DeepSeek feels like “a first-generation AI app, similar to the early days of ChatGPT,” Doubao represents the second generation of AI platforms in China, says Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst who writes the Substack newsletter Hello China Tech. Doubao “integrates richer functions, clear visual cues, and scenario-based guidance, which significantly reduces the cognitive barrier to using large models. That makes them far more approachable for mass-market users,” Zhao says.

Over time, ByteDance has introduced more and more features for Doubao, many of which it copied from its rivals. For example, when Google introduced an update that allowed Gemini to generate realistic 3D objects in August, Doubao quickly added a 3D preset function into its image generation menu.

Doubao doesn’t necessarily have the most advanced AI capabilities on the market, but ByteDance does one thing especially well: encouraging users to share their interactions with the chatbot on social media. Douyin users can tag Doubao in the comments of a video and have it provide a text summary of the video’s content, and Doubao users are also recommended Douyin videos in answers and can view them natively in Doubao without switching to a different app.

“It’s where convenience meets dopamine, especially for young generations,” says Wei Sun, the principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research, a Hong Kong–based technology market research firm. “It's just enough for virality. That light, low-effort user experience is exactly what drives social sharing and sticky engagement in China. It may not be the best in class, but it's best for distribution.”

As a result, Doubao-generated images are everywhere on Chinese social media platforms, distinguished by the Doubao watermark in their bottom right corner. For example, when a user asked what to do with the empty space in their bedroom on RedNote, China’s hottest social media platform, the comments were filled with interior design suggestions rendered by Doubao. They ranged from practical ideas, like installing shelving and storage, to ridiculous jokes like opening a boba tea store in the room.

Influencers are also using Doubao’s text-to-speech function to generate content, Zhang notes. The app allows them to build interactive audio chat agents with 20 different regional dialects, allowing them to generate the specific comedic effects that different audiences want. “There are these viral videos on Chinese internet of people talking to [Doubao] and essentially having it say voice-based memes. And that implicitly targets an audience that prefers voice over text,” Zhang says.

At the heart of Doubao’s success is ByteDance’s long legacy of developing viral mobile apps. The company obviously knows how to make popular, even addictive, platforms—just look at TikTok and Douyin. ByteDance is often referred to as the “app factory” in China because it regularly launches dozens of new apps for a plethora of different use cases. It has a strong institutional muscle for iterating fast, rapidly testing features, and driving users from one app to another.

This is where experts say ByteDance has a significant edge over DeepSeek, an AI startup that has almost no experience in building consumer-facing platforms. DeepSeek’s early hype was driven by its first model’s efficiency and performance, but its product remains fairly minimalistic—it’s still basically just a text chatbot. While DeepSeek’s AI has a reputation for excelling at math and logic tasks, it’s lagging behind the competition when it comes to multi-modal functionality and onboarding new users.

Some consumers left DeepSeek because they were looking for image capability or autonomous agents, while others left because DeepSeek’s servers often couldn't handle the amount of traffic the chatbot was getting, says McGrath. Many of them wound up converging on Doubao. QuestMobile data from August shows that almost 40 percent of users who left DeepSeek switched to Doubao instead.

ByteDance is now trying to bring Doubao to other parts of its technology ecosystem. The company has reportedly worked with makers of smart glasses, carmakers (including Tesla), and other device OEMs to embed Doubao as in-car assistants or AI companions, extending the reach of Doubao beyond smartphones and computers.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.