China’s AI Chatbot Market Sees ByteDance’s Doubao Leading Through Innovation and Accessibility

Doubao is an AI chatbot created by ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin/TikTok. It was released in August 2024 in China and soon became one of the most prominent AI chatbots in the country. It doesn't have a clear profit model, but it still became successful and is now being used by millions of users in China. As of November 2024, Doubao has 60 million monthly active users and this shows that other competitors have no chance. Baidu’s Wen Xiaoyan has 13 million monthly active users while Moonshot AI’s Kimi has 12.8 monthly active users. Doubao is being well liked by users because of its high functionality and user experience.

Just like ChatGPT, Doubao also offers users advanced image, video and text processing capabilities. It is a multimodal on which users can generate high quality texts, images and videos, and can even ask it to generate image interpretations and audio-based content. The platform is versatile and ByteDance promises users to bring more innovations to Doubao. It is also greatly helping users for their professional needs, like academic research, content creation and personal entertainment. It resonates well with users and it is providing them with helpful and deeper interactions.

ByteDance also has a powerful ecosystem which has contributed to Doubao’s success. Douyin, Chinese equivalent of TikTok, has a massive user base so the company has integrated Doubao into this digital landscape too. It also offers data-driven personalization which helps users build their own experiences, and helps them connect with Doubao directly.

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Doubao gives users highly relevant and contextualized responses, which makes it different from its competitors. ByteDance also has technological superiority and offers advanced functionality, which is helping Doubao in its rapid growth. Right now, Doubao is a leader in the AI chatbots landscape because of all the qualities mentioned above.

Chinese tech giants are also lowering their LLM prices to make them more accessible to users. The price of Doubao’s main model is 99.3% less than average industry prices for business users. As affordability is a big factor in China to access something, this pricing strategy is a good way to make the AI chatbot widespread so all types of users can use it.

Domestic Ranking	AI Product (Company)	November App MAU	November MAU Monthly Change
1	Doubao (Douyin/ByteDance)	59.98M	+16.92%
2	ERNIE Bot (Baidu)	12.99M	+3.33%
3	Kimi (Moonshot AI)	12.82M	+27.40%
4	ChatGLM (Zhipu AI)	6.37M	+22.18%
5	iFlyTek Spark (iFlyTek)	5.94M	+4.23%

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World