• ByteDance’s AI chatbot Doubao has risen to become the leading AI chatbot in China with nearly 60 million monthly active users as of November 2024, far outpacing competitors like Baidu and Alibaba-backed AI chatbots.
• Doubao’s multimodal capabilities, including text, image and audio processing within a versatile interface, set it apart in the AI chatbot landscape. The upcoming text-to-video feature further elevates its appeal, promising to transform creative workflows and redefine user interaction, amplified by ByteDance’s extensive social media reach.
• Doubao leverages ByteDance's ecosystem for seamless integration and user personalization, combined with an aggressive pricing strategy that makes its advanced proprietary large models widely accessible to individuals and businesses.

Doubao, a conversational AI chatbot created by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok/Douyin, has swiftly risen to prominence as China’s most popular AI-powered app, overshadowing a crowded field of competitors. This remarkable success comes despite the absence of a clear profit model, highlighting the platform’s ability to captivate a vast audience purely through its functionality and user experience.
Launched in August, Doubao has achieved a commanding lead in the AI chatbot space, boasting nearly 60 million monthly active users (MAUs) in November 2024. Its widespread adoption has left competitors trailing far behind, including Baidu’s Wenxiaoyan — previously branded as Ernie Bot — with 13 million MAUs, and Alibaba Group-backed Moonshot AI’s Kimi with 12.8 million. The scale of Doubao’s user base underscores its appeal in a market characterized by rapid technological innovation and fierce competition.

Top 5 Most Popular AI Chatbots in China, November 2024

Sources: aicpb.com, Counterpoint Research

Much like its international rival ChatGPT, the cornerstone of Doubao’s appeal is its multimodality, offering advanced text, image and audio processing capabilities. Users can generate creative outputs, from vivid text descriptions to detailed image interpretations, and even audio-based content. ByteDance’s forward-looking innovation is evident in the forthcoming text-to-video feature, which promises to revolutionize how users interact with AI. This versatility enhances user engagement, catering to both professional needs, such as content creation and academic research, and personal entertainment. The result is an AI chatbot that resonates with users across diverse contexts, fostering deeper interaction.

Doubao’s success is also rooted in ByteDance’s powerful ecosystem. Leveraging its massive user base from platforms like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, ByteDance has integrated Doubao seamlessly into its digital landscape, ensuring instant visibility and accessibility. Data-driven personalization tailors user experiences, while built-in platform integration allows users to connect Doubao with familiar ByteDance services effortlessly. This ecosystem advantage not only accelerates adoption but also sustains engagement through data flywheel, positioning Doubao as a natural extension of users’ digital routines.

At the heart of Doubao’s technological edge lie its proprietary large models, which power its unmatched functionality. ByteDance is well-known for its technological superiority, as well as its renowned AI recommendation algorithms. Therefore, Doubao delivers highly relevant and contextualized responses, setting it apart from competitors. The platform’s rapid iteration capability ensures continuous improvement, keeping pace with user demands and technological advancements. This solidifies Doubao’s position as a leader in the rapidly evolving AI chatbot landscape.

Finally, Chinese tech giants have been slashing their LLM prices since May this year. ByteDance is one of them, pricing Doubao’s main model 99.3% below the industry average for business users. This has made its cutting-edge capabilities accessible to a broad audience.

In a market like China, where affordability often determines adoption, Doubao is able to strike a good balance between quality and cost, democratizing access to AI. This pricing strategy not only attracts individual users but also encourages widespread use among small businesses, educators and content creators, broadening Doubao’s impact across society.