Doubao is an AI chatbot developed by ByteDance, based on its proprietary large language model (originally called the Skylark model). It supports text, image, audio/video generation, voice calling, data analysis, and AI-driven online search capabilities. Since its initial launch in August 2023, Doubao has rapidly grown into one of China's most popular AI applications. Doubao is positioned as a comprehensive AI Agent platform, delivering diversified intelligent agent experiences across a wide range of user scenarios.
Doubao is more than a simple chatbot — it is a platform-level product integrating multiple AI capabilities, leveraging ByteDance's massive ecosystem to deliver value across consumer and enterprise markets.
Doubao supports multi-platform usage, including web, iOS, Android, and Windows/macOS desktop clients, enabling real-time synchronization of conversation content across devices. Its humanized interaction design and low-barrier experience cater to mass-market needs — from dating advice to travel planning, its scenario-based services cover the full spectrum of daily life.
Doubao's core differentiation rests on three pillars: first, deep integration with ByteDance's ecosystem including Douyin (TikTok China), CapCut, Lark, and Toutiao; second, an aggressive ultra-low pricing strategy for the enterprise market that ushered in the era of "pricing by the thousandth of a cent"; and third, a humanized interaction design and rich AI agent ecosystem that makes advanced AI accessible to non-technical users.
Incubation Phase (2016–July 2023). In 2016, ByteDance established its AI Lab, focusing on research in natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining.
Public Beta & Agent Exploration (August 2023–May 2024). In August 2023, Doubao began a gradual rollout on domestic app stores, while simultaneously launching an overseas counterpart called Cici. In November 2023, ByteDance formally established FLOW, a dedicated AI-focused organizational unit with a core mission of exploring AI application innovation. During this period, Doubao's product iteration focused on building an in-app agent ecosystem, launching 22 official agents covering learning, voice chat, AI image generation, lifestyle assistance, and coding assistance.
Commercialization Launch & Hyper-Growth (May 2024–December 2024). On May 15, 2024, ByteDance announced the official commercial launch of the Doubao large model, pricing the Doubao Pro-32k model at just ¥0.0008 per thousand tokens for enterprise use — a 99.3% reduction from industry benchmarks, pushing the large model market from "pricing per cent" to "pricing per thousandth of a cent." According to QuestMobile data, by the end of November 2024, Doubao's monthly active users reached approximately 56 million, capturing nearly half of the industry's total monthly active users.
National-Scale Application Phase (2025–Present). In January 2025, Doubao launched its real-time voice large model, supporting emotional interaction and dialect comprehension. On June 11, 2025, the Doubao 1.6 model series was officially released at the Volcano Engine Force Conference, achieving multimodal reasoning and introducing a highly competitive unified pricing model that reduced enterprise costs by 63%. By the end of September 2025, daily token invocations exceeded 30 trillion, covering approximately 300 million devices, with integrations across Xiaomi, Samsung, Tesla, Audi, Lenovo, and other major brands. In December 2025, Volcano Engine officially released the Doubao 1.8 model. On February 14, 2026, ByteDance released Doubao 2.0, featuring Pro, Lite, and Mini general-purpose Agent models along with a Code model. The Pro version targets deep reasoning and long-chain task execution, directly benchmarking against GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.
Doubao employs a conversational interface that functions as a chatbot while supporting the creation of AI agent identities that interact with users in natural, engaging tones and emotional styles. AI search is positioned as one of Doubao's most critical foundational capabilities, integrating ByteDance's internal Douyin Search and Toutiao Search, connecting to Bing and other search engines for web-wide search, and expanding into academic search and deep search modes.
Multimodal functionality has been the most frequently updated module over the past year, including continuous expansion of voice chat, text-to-image, image-to-image, video generation, image understanding, and music generation capabilities. Its multimodal capabilities serve as a key differentiator — the "super app" form factor integrating text-to-image, voice interaction, and video generation enables even non-technical users to get started easily.
In July 2025, Doubao's "Deep Research" feature began testing across the Doubao App, web version, and desktop client, available to users for free. Users can select "Deep Research," input detailed instructions or a one-line prompt, and receive a comprehensive report within minutes. Reports generated on the Doubao App can also be converted to podcast format with a single tap for on-the-go listening.
Doubao supports AI programming functionality. Web applications generated through "AI Programming" can be directly edited in the preview interface — users can modify text, intelligently swap images, and adjust individual elements, enabling users with zero coding experience to build applications.
The AI Cloud Drive supports multi-format preview across PDF, Word, PPT, Excel, and up to 42 office file formats without requiring downloads. The data analysis feature enables one-click data merging, deduplication, format conversion, analysis, and chart creation. Doubao also supports generating mind maps, flowcharts, and sequence diagrams within free-form conversations.
The desktop voice calling feature can be launched via the homepage skill bar, desktop launcher, or Doubao's floating avatar. Doubao can express rich emotions, switch between diverse voice profiles, speak dialects, sing, and simulate character voices for a more intelligent voice interaction experience. Across multiple evaluation dimensions including humanization, usefulness, emotional intelligence, and conversation fluency, Doubao's real-time voice model scored 4.36 out of 5, compared to GPT-4o's 3.18.
Doubao users can chat with the default AI assistant, find specialized agents to solve specific problems — such as an oral English tutor, fitness coach, or philosophy scholar — and also participate in creating UGC (user-generated content) agents to build personalized AI characters. Over 8 million agents have been created on the Doubao platform.
Beyond expanding general AI capabilities, Doubao has been highly proactive in vertical AI applications, including education (photo-based problem solving), office productivity (data analysis, meeting transcription, PPT generation, cloud drive), and creative work (poster generation, avatar photography).
In 2025, Doubao underwent a series of important updates, with the most notable being the release of the Doubao Phone Assistant technical preview, marking Doubao's transformation from an app-level AI to a system-level AI assistant. On December 1, 2025, Doubao partnered with ZTE to launch the "Doubao AI Phone" nubia M153, which sold out immediately after being listed on ZTE's online store. ByteDance's collaboration with ZTE on the Doubao Phone Assistant attempts to complete cross-app operations at the system level, pointing toward a future where AI directly operates interfaces without modifying individual apps.
Doubao completed a major feature upgrade in October 2025, officially integrating with the Douyin Mall. When users raise consumption-related questions, Doubao now recommends specific products and guides users to complete purchases. Users can initiate product inquiries within the chat interface, receive categorized recommendations, tap on products of interest to open available stores in the Douyin Mall, and complete orders after selecting specifications.
Doubao's technical core includes the Doubao-Seed language model series (including the 1.6 base and deep-thinking versions), Seedance 1.0 Pro for video generation, and Seedream for image generation, covering the full chain from everyday conversation to professional content production.
UltraMem is a novel sparse model architecture proposed by the Doubao large model team. It achieves 2–6x faster inference compared to traditional MoE architectures while reducing inference costs by up to 83%, all while maintaining model performance. This innovation was accepted at ICLR 2025.
In January 2025, the Doubao 1.5 model was released, featuring comprehensive improvements in multimodal capabilities. In June 2025, the Doubao 1.6 series launched with three variants: doubao-seed-1.6 (a comprehensive model supporting 256K context), doubao-seed-1.6-thinking (an enhanced deep-thinking version), and doubao-seed-1.6-flash (an ultra-fast version).
In October 2025, an upgraded Doubao 1.6 was released with native support for four thinking depths. In December 2025, the Doubao 1.8 model was officially released. On February 14, 2026, Doubao 2.0 was released with Pro, Lite, and Mini general-purpose Agent models and a Code model, with the Pro version targeting deep reasoning and benchmarking against GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.
The Doubao large model's daily token invocation volume grew from 120 billion at its May 2024 launch to 1.6 trillion in May 2025, then to 30 trillion per day by September 2025 — a 253x increase. By December 2025, daily invocations exceeded 50 trillion tokens, representing a 66.7% increase from October and over 10x year-over-year growth.
Volcano Engine has partnered with 9 of the world's top 10 smartphone manufacturers for voice assistant and creative tool services; collaborates with 80% of mainstream automakers covering intelligent cockpits, autonomous driving annotation, and smart marketing; serves 70% of China's systemically important banks including China Merchants Bank and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank; and works with over half of China's "985" elite universities on AI-powered teaching and research. In the enterprise market, according to IDC, Volcano Engine ranks first in public cloud large model service call volume in China, with a 49.2% market share.
Doubao's growth has gone through distinct phases: from under 100,000 MAU during its August 2023 invite-only test, to 10 million MAU by November 2023, and 26 million MAU by May 2024. By November 2024, Doubao's MAU reached approximately 56 million.
Growth accelerated dramatically in 2025: Q1 MAU was 99.8 million, Q2 climbed to 130 million, and Q3 reached 159 million, surpassing DeepSeek's 146 million. In Q4 2025, Doubao achieved a 42.5% quarter-over-quarter growth rate on a user base already exceeding 100 million, pushing MAU to a record 226 million.
According to QuestMobile data, Doubao broke through the 100-million DAU threshold by Q3 2025. Doubao became the first AI-native application to surpass 100 million daily active users. Doubao leads all AI applications with approximately 200 million MAU.
In December 2025, Doubao, DeepSeek, Yuanbao, Ant Afu, and Qwen ranked as the top five AI applications, with Doubao commanding an overwhelming lead at 226 million active users, while the combined total of the remaining four was 228 million.
In a16z's 2025 Global Generative AI Consumer Application Ranking, Doubao placed 10th among the top 50 AI-native mobile applications. Doubao has become a national-scale product with a cumulative historical download count of 270 million.
Doubao's basic features are entirely free, allowing the general public to access AI services at no cost — a significant factor in promoting AI technology adoption. The C-side free strategy essentially subsidizes user acquisition to fuel the B-side model service business, leveraging the data flywheel effect generated by massive user engagement to continuously improve model capabilities.
On May 15, 2024, ByteDance announced that its flagship Doubao model would be priced at ¥0.0008 per thousand tokens for enterprise use — 99.3% cheaper than industry benchmarks. This strategy directly ignited a price war across China's large model market.
Doubao 1.6 introduced a disruptive unified pricing model, pioneering pricing by "input length" intervals. In the most frequently used 0–32K input range, pricing is fixed at ¥0.8 per million input tokens and ¥8 per million output tokens. The comprehensive cost of just ¥2.6 represents a 63% reduction compared to the ¥7 cost of both the Doubao 1.5 deep-thinking model and DeepSeek R1.
Volcano Engine innovatively eliminated "surcharges" for advanced features, implementing unified pricing. This means customers no longer pay extra for advanced AI capabilities — everyone can afford the "full-featured version" of large model services.
Volcano Engine President Tan Dai revealed that the large model product has the fastest revenue growth among all Volcano Engine business lines, far exceeding other products, and also leads in gross margin. According to IDC data released in late March, Volcano Engine commands 46.4% of China's public cloud large model service call volume market share, far ahead of Baidu AI Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
For ByteDance's e-commerce business, Doubao brings not just a new monetization channel, but a previously missing traffic paradigm. What Doubao introduces is a third e-commerce logic: users proactively initiate AI conversations with clear intent, placing orders at the most decisive point in their shopping journey. With over 100 million DAU on one hand and Douyin e-commerce and local life services' vast merchant resources on the other, connecting these two ends makes AI the dispatch center for e-commerce and life services.
The competitive landscape for AI assistant applications shows a clear tiered structure. Doubao leads with approximately 200 million MAU, while Alibaba's Qwen shows explosive growth with a 31.7% compound growth rate. Doubao's MAU reached 172 million by end of Q3 2025, surpassing DeepSeek's 145 million. Tencent Yuanbao, Jimeng AI, and Kimi form a second tier with 32.86 million, 10.12 million, and 9.67 million MAU respectively.
In early 2025, DeepSeek held the lead due to extreme market buzz, with Q1 MAU of 187 million versus Doubao's 99.8 million. However, Doubao began its counteroffensive in Q2 and overtook DeepSeek by Q3. DeepSeek's strengths lie in its technical reputation and open-source strategy, which have earned strong developer trust. Doubao's advantages, by contrast, stem from ByteDance's traffic ecosystem and formidable commercial operations capability.
ByteDance's Doubao leverages traffic dominance to seize the "video-entertainment agent entry point," generating multimodal entertainment content. Tencent Yuanbao, meanwhile, leverages WeChat's social graph to explore the "social agent entry point," extending into office and personal knowledge agent use cases via Tencent Cloud. The two products have fundamentally different ecosystem positioning, with Yuanbao being smaller in scale but growing steadily.
During the 2026 Spring Festival, Qwen's MAU surged from 31.05 million in January to 203 million in February — a 552.83% month-over-month increase, setting a record for single-month growth among AI products. Alibaba's Qwen app is fully integrated with Alibaba's ecosystem including Taobao, Alipay, Taobao Flash Shopping, Fliggy, and Amap — enabling not just conversation but task execution on behalf of users. Qwen represents the most formidable challenger to Doubao's leading position.
| Dimension | Doubao | DeepSeek | Tencent Yuanbao | Alibaba Qwen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MAU (2025 Q4) | 226M | 135M | ~40M | ~30M (surged post-Spring Festival) |
| Core Advantage | ByteDance ecosystem + multimodal | Technical reputation + open source | WeChat social ecosystem | Alibaba commercial ecosystem |
| Monetization | Content/entertainment + e-commerce | Developer/enterprise | Social + office | Shopping + life services |
| B-Side Positioning | LLM API services | Open source / API | Tencent Cloud integration | Alibaba Cloud integration |
Doubao's user-friendly experience design, zero-barrier entry, and rich lifestyle features enable it to cover user groups spanning from teenagers to seniors across all age demographics.
Students rely on features like photo-based problem solving, English conversation practice, and paper writing assistance; content creators use text-to-image, video generation, and music creation tools; developers and enterprises leverage MarsCode intelligent coding and API services; and everyday users turn to Doubao for lifestyle advice, travel planning, and document summarization.
Currently, Doubao's user base skews toward working professionals, with relatively fewer young users. In the future, younger demographics interested in social interaction and gaming will represent an important growth segment. Users in lower-tier cities and female users are also gradually increasing.
Through its Spring Festival Gala sponsorship — with AI-generated avatars, blessing videos, and New Year greeting copy — Doubao made AI a participant in holiday celebrations. On New Year's Eve, the Doubao app completed 1.9 billion interactions, marking a milestone moment in nationwide AI adoption.
Using Doubao as a representative example, Chinese AI products are evolving through "all-in-one functionality" and "full-companion form factors," ascending from "single-point efficiency tools" to "end-to-end super tools."
Douyin has been testing the integration of Doubao's AI capabilities within its app, opening two super entry points for Doubao — one alongside the like, comment, and share buttons on short video pages, and another within Douyin's message list. ByteDance strategically leverages high-traffic placements across Douyin, Toutiao, and other properties to drive efficient user acquisition for Doubao.
Last year, the Doubao large model led the industry in price cuts, reducing token pricing by an order of magnitude and triggering an industry-wide price reduction wave. This year, Doubao's further price cuts aim to capture new opportunities in cloud services arising from the scale deployment of AI agents.
User enthusiasm for creating agents on Doubao is unparalleled across other platforms. Many users actively create fan-made derivative content, designing new "Doubao personas" and producing abstract IPs like "Dousha" and "Doujiao." Some users have even created "ita-bags" covered with Doubao badges. This type of collective memeing typically only occurs with phenomenon-level IPs.
ByteDance secured the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, with Volcano Engine becoming the exclusive AI cloud partner for the 2026 Gala, while Doubao launched multiple interactive engagement features. Doubao's Spring Festival Gala appearance aims to achieve sustained mass-market breakthrough through national-level exposure.
Powerful ByteDance Ecosystem Synergy. Developers building agents on Volcano Engine can rapidly reach massive user bases through the Doubao ecosystem, with precise distribution via traffic entry points in Douyin, Toutiao, and other properties. Doubao's deep integration with Douyin, CapCut, Lark, and Toutiao creates a powerful trinity of content ecosystem, traffic channels, and AI capability.
Ultra-Competitive Pricing. The Doubao large model is priced at ¥0.0008 per thousand tokens — 99.3% cheaper than competitors. This strategy has been instrumental in driving large-scale model adoption.
Leading User Scale. Doubao is the only AI-native application in China to surpass 100 million DAU, with over 200 million MAU, creating a powerful data flywheel effect.
Extensive B-Side Device Coverage. As of September 2025, Doubao covers approximately 300 million devices, with integrations across Xiaomi, Samsung, Tesla, Audi, Lenovo, and other major brands.
Model Capability Gaps Remain. In certain evaluations, Doubao's intelligence level still has room for improvement compared to other large model products. While model capabilities are rapidly iterating, gaps persist in complex reasoning and specialized domains.
Privacy & Security Concerns. The Doubao AI Phone nubia M153 has raised concerns due to complex feature operations and privacy protection issues. There have also been incidents where users' WeChat IDs were surfaced through AI search.
Unclear C-Side Monetization Path. While the free strategy has driven user scale, monetization remains primarily dependent on B-side API calls. C-side revenue models (e-commerce, advertising) are still in early exploration stages.
AI Phone/Hardware Market Explosion. ByteDance's partnership with ZTE on the Doubao AI Phone represents just the beginning. IDC projects that China's next-generation AI phone shipments will reach 147 million units in 2026, representing 31.6% year-over-year growth.
The Agent Era. Agent-scale deployment presents new opportunities for cloud services. ByteDance is laying both technological and scenario-based foundations for the coming Agentic AI era.
E-Commerce & Local Life Integration. Doubao's integration with Douyin Mall and local life services positions it as a potential new-paradigm AI commerce entry point, opening entirely new monetization pathways.
Competitors Accelerating. Qwen's MAU surged from 31.05 million to 203 million during the 2026 Spring Festival, with Alibaba leveraging its powerful commercial ecosystem and subsidy strategy to pose a direct threat to Doubao's leadership.
App Blocking Risks. In December 2025, Doubao's cross-application operation capabilities through its AI Phone Assistant triggered feature restrictions from mainstream apps including WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Pinduoduo, and Honor of Kings. The development of system-level AI assistants faces significant ecosystem resistance.
Price War Sustainability. Price wars affect large and small companies differently — large companies can leverage scale effects and resource advantages to offset the impact of price reductions. However, sustained ultra-low pricing may compress profit margins over the long term.
Overseas Market Constraints. Beginning January 19, 2025, applications developed by ByteDance and its subsidiaries are no longer available for download or update by U.S. users on the App Store. Geopolitical factors constrain Doubao's global expansion ambitions.
2026 is widely regarded as the "Year of the Universal AI Entry Point" — the battle for C-side AI entry points is fundamentally a comprehensive competition across models, traffic, ecosystems, and data. Doubao should further strengthen its deep integration with Douyin's e-commerce and local life services, evolving from a "conversational tool" into a "task orchestration hub" for users' daily lives — achieving the leap from "decision support" to "execution closure."
Doubao 2.0 Pro has achieved results in IMO and CMO mathematics competitions and ICPC programming competitions, benchmarking against GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro. However, continued effort is needed in complex reasoning and long-chain task scenarios to keep pace with global leaders. The recommendation is to prioritize instruction-following stability and deep domain expertise while maintaining rapid iteration velocity.
The AI Phone represents a critical strategic move from "app-level entry point" to "system-level entry point," but currently faces ecosystem resistance from mainstream app blocking. A more open collaboration strategy is recommended — co-building mutually beneficial ecosystems with phone manufacturers and app developers rather than unilaterally intruding into other applications' operational spaces.
With C-side currently dominated by free usage and monetization dependent on B-side API calls, Doubao should gradually explore premium paid features (such as advanced Deep Research, specialized agents, and AI Cloud Drive value-added services), as well as e-commerce commissions and precision-targeted advertising to diversify revenue streams while keeping basic features free.
As user scale exceeds 200 million and the AI Phone Assistant involves deeper system-level permissions, privacy protection and data compliance become increasingly critical. Establishing more transparent data usage mechanisms, proactively participating in industry standard-setting, and building compliance capability as a trust moat are strongly recommended.
Doubao, as ByteDance's flagship strategic product for the AI era, has achieved explosive growth from zero to over 200 million MAU in just over two years, becoming China's largest AI-native application. Its success is driven by ByteDance's powerful traffic ecosystem synergy, ultra-competitive pricing strategy, and high-frequency product iteration capability.
From a product evolution perspective, Doubao has progressed through multiple strategic upgrades — from conversational tool to agent platform, from multimodal super app to AI commerce entry point, and from application-level to system-level AI assistant — demonstrating ByteDance's formidable execution in AI productization.
Looking ahead, Doubao's core challenges lie in building a sustainable business model while maintaining user scale advantages, breaking through ecosystem barriers in the AI phone and system-level entry point competition, and defending its leading position against aggressive challengers like Qwen. Whoever wins the AI entry point wins the world — this battle for the AI super entry point has only just begun.
Report Date: March 19, 2026
Data as of: Latest publicly available information