Doubao

Doubao is an AI assistant made by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin. It launched in August 2023. It answers questions, writes text, translates, helps with homework and creates images and short videos.

The app runs on ByteDance's own models, which the company sells to businesses through its Volcano Engine cloud. Doubao offers voice chat, image understanding and a set of character bots that users can talk to. It is available on the web, as a desktop app and on mobile, mainly for Chinese speaking users. Users can upload documents and photos and ask questions about them. It also helps with writing tasks such as reports, emails and social posts.

Doubao is free to use. ByteDance has priced its models aggressively for business customers, which has pushed rivals in China to cut their own prices. The app is one of the most downloaded AI assistants in China. ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing. For users outside China, ByteDance runs a separate assistant called Cici.