ByteDance launches Doubao chatbot in invitation-only testing

ByteDance began invitation-only testing of Doubao (豆包), a text, image and voice chatbot built on its own Volcano Engine infrastructure, entering a Chinese chatbot market that had filled up quickly since ChatGPT’s release the previous November — Baidu’s Ernie, Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot AI’s Kimi had all launched or announced products in the same window. ByteDance also ran an international variant, initially called Cici and later Dola, powered by third-party models rather than its own infrastructure.

Doubao’s early release gave few public details of scale or capability; coverage at the time noted only that it offered basic text generation, question answering and conversational features to its invited testers. Its significance became visible only in retrospect: by late 2024 it had tens of millions of monthly active users and had grown into the most-used AI chatbot in China, later overtaking Baidu’s Ernie Bot, and by 2026 its user base had expanded into the hundreds of millions.

The launch is a marker of how crowded and fast-moving China’s large-model market became within a year of ChatGPT’s release, with the country’s largest consumer internet companies — not just its AI labs — racing to ship their own assistants.