Doubao: ByteDance’s AI Assistant Leading China’s AI Revolution

In the competitive landscape of artificial intelligence, China’s market is witnessing the remarkable rise of powerful AI assistants. Among them, Doubao (豆包), developed by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has emerged as a dominant force in the Chinese AI market since its launch in August 2023.What is Doubao?

Doubao is a sophisticated multimodal AI assistant that integrates natural language processing, content generation, and image creation capabilities. Launched in August 2023, the platform operates internationally under the name “Cici” and supports 18 languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, and Korean.

As of November 2024, Doubao has become China’s most popular AI chatbot with approximately 159 million monthly active users, significantly outpacing competitors like Tencent’s Yuanbao (73 million) and DeepSeek (72 million). Globally, Doubao has achieved over 1.2 billion downloads with 51 million active users, making it the second-largest generative AI platform worldwide, trailing only ChatGPT.Key Features and Capabilities

Doubao offers a comprehensive suite of AI-powered features designed for diverse use cases:

Natural Language Processing: Engages in context-aware conversations across a wide range of topics with human-like understanding and maintains conversational memory for more coherent interactions.

Content Generation: Creates articles, stories, marketing copy, code, and other written content. The platform excels at generating, debugging, and explaining code in multiple programming languages including Python, Java, C++, and JavaScript.

Image Creation: Generates images from text descriptions using AI-powered visual generation technology.

Multimodal Understanding: Processes and works with text, images, audio, and video inputs, enabling comprehensive document analysis and file parsing for PDFs, Word, Excel, PPT, and TXT files.

Voice Capabilities: Includes speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and voice commands. In January 2025, ByteDance launched a real-time voice large model, significantly enhancing the platform’s voice interaction capabilities.Doubao’s Journey and Growth

Since its launch in August 2023, Doubao has experienced remarkable growth:

In January 2025, ByteDance released Doubao-1.5-pro, a reasoning model designed to compete directly with OpenAI’s o1Beyond Mobile: Doubao’s Hardware Integration

In December 2025, ByteDance took a significant step by introducing the Doubao Phone Assistant, moving from app-level functionality to OS-level integration. This feature debuted on the ZTE nubia M153 smartphone, allowing users to perform complex tasks across multiple apps through voice commands, such as:

• Ordering food delivery
• Booking tickets
• Price comparison while shopping
• Replying to WeChat messages
• Operating mini-program games

This represents a shift toward agentic AI capabilities, where the assistant can understand user intent and execute multi-step tasks automatically across different applications. However, this integration has faced some challenges, with certain third-party apps implementing restrictions on the assistant’s access due to fairness and security concerns.Technical Architecture

Doubao is powered by ByteDance’s proprietary large language models with multimodal capabilities. The platform uses:

• Diverse training data including text, images, code, and multilingual content
• Advanced memory systems for maintaining conversation context
• Integrated systems for processing text, images, audio, and video
• Built-in content filtering and safety measures
• Advanced prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques

The underlying Doubao large model has been tested across over 50 business scenarios within ByteDance, processing billions of tokens daily, which has contributed to its continuous improvement and reliability.Competitive Landscape

Doubao’s success places it at the forefront of China’s competitive AI market. With 159 million monthly active users as of October 2024, it significantly outpaces domestic competitors:

• Tencent’s Yuanbao: 73 million MAU
• DeepSeek: 72 million MAU

Globally, only ChatGPT surpasses Doubao in terms of user adoption, making ByteDance’s AI assistant a formidable player in the international AI landscape.

Implications for the AI Industry

Doubao’s rapid rise demonstrates several important trends:

Enterprise Adoption: The launch of enterprise versions and competitive pricing strategies indicate ByteDance’s commitment to capturing both consumer and business markets.Conclusion

Doubao represents a significant milestone in the evolution of AI assistants, combining sophisticated multimodal capabilities with aggressive market expansion strategies. As ByteDance continues to invest heavily in AI infrastructure and explore new integration opportunities, Doubao is well-positioned to remain a dominant force in the Chinese AI market and a strong competitor globally.

For businesses and individuals interested in AI technology, Doubao offers a compelling alternative to Western AI platforms, with its multilingual support, comprehensive feature set, and deep integration with popular Chinese platforms. As the platform continues to evolve, it will be interesting to observe how it shapes the future of AI assistant technology and influences the broader competitive landscape.

To explore Doubao, visit the official website at https://www.doubao.com/ or download the mobile app available on major app stores. The platform is also accessible internationally under the name “Cici” for users outside China.

Multimodal Integration: The success of Doubao underscores the importance of offering comprehensive AI capabilities across text, voice, and image modalities.

OS-Level Integration: The move toward system-level AI assistants represents the next frontier in AI adoption, enabling more seamless and powerful user experiences.

Chinese AI Innovation: Doubao’s achievements highlight China’s growing capabilities in developing competitive AI technologies that rival Western counterparts.

By October 2023, it surpassed 50 million monthly active users, becoming China’s largest AI chatbot

In May 2024, ByteDance launched the enterprise version, positioning itself competitively in the B2B market with aggressive pricing strategies

By September 2024, Doubao was processing over 30 trillion tokens daily, more than doubling its capacity from earlier in the year

The platform maintained its position as China’s #1 AI app with 150-170 million monthly active users by late 2024