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What Is Doubao? ByteDance's AI Chatbot Explained

Doubao is ByteDance's AI assistant and China's most used AI app. A plain guide to its Seed models, features, paid plans, the Dola app abroad and Chinese rules.

Olivetti-style cover titled WHAT IS DOUBAO with red, mustard and teal blocks, a chat bubble icon and a phone icon
Olivetti-style cover titled WHAT IS DOUBAO with red, mustard and teal blocks, a chat bubble icon and a phone icon

Doubao is ByteDance's AI assistant. It is China's most used AI app, ahead of Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek, in QuestMobile data reported by The Straits Times, and it stayed first in QuestMobile's September 2026 ranking. Outside China, ByteDance runs a separate app, Dola, and the main Doubao app is built for the Chinese market.

This guide explains what Doubao is, who makes it, which models run it, what it can do, how it differs from its international sibling Dola, and what to think about before you use it. It covers the parts of the story that change slowly. For prices, plans and exact model versions, check ByteDance's own pages on the day you read this.

Diagram of how Doubao fits together: ByteDance Seed builds the models, Volcano Engine sells model API access to businesses, the Doubao app is the consumer chatbot in China, and Dola, formerly Cici, is the app abroad

What Doubao is

Doubao (豆包) is an AI assistant developed by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. WIRED reports that it launched in 2023.

In practice the name covers three related things:

  • The Doubao app. A consumer chatbot, with an official site at doubao.com. This is what most people mean by "Doubao."
  • The Doubao models. The large language models behind the app. ByteDance's research group, the Seed team, builds them.
  • The Doubao model API. Businesses and developers can call the same model family through ByteDance's cloud arm, Volcano Engine (Volcengine), on its model platform.

Keeping these apart helps. A headline about "Doubao" can mean a new app feature, a new model, or a cloud deal. For how ByteDance compares with other Chinese labs, see our guide to China's AI labs.

Who makes it

ByteDance builds Doubao in-house. The models come from the ByteDance Seed team, which says its LLM series "has supported C-end products with hundreds of millions of users, such as Doubao."

Volcano Engine sells access to those models to companies. Its model platform is titled the Doubao large model API service platform (豆包大模型API服务平台).

Why it matters: ByteDance runs the whole chain, from model research to cloud to a consumer app. WIRED writes that ByteDance's advantage is years of building addictive mobile apps that over a billion people use daily, and quotes Shanghai-based investor and technologist Dermot McGrath: "Neither Google nor OpenAI have mastered the kind of dopamine-driven engagement that ByteDance built TikTok on" (WIRED, October 2025).

How big it is

Figures for Doubao come from third-party trackers and move fast, so treat each one as a dated snapshot:

  • August 2025: more than 157 million monthly active users, per QuestMobile, as reported by WIRED.
  • March 2026: 345 million monthly active users, per QuestMobile, as reported by The Straits Times. The same data put Qwen at 166 million and DeepSeek at 127 million.
  • May 2026: 382 million monthly active users, per QuestMobile, as reported by The Next Web.
  • September 2026: 419 million monthly active users, per QuestMobile data reported by CNMO. The same ranking put Qwen at 158 million and DeepSeek at 123 million.

The Straits Times reported that Doubao's monthly users grew by some 100 million in the first quarter of 2026, per QuestMobile data. It also reported that Doubao featured prominently during the Spring Festival Gala, as part of a Chinese New Year marketing push by China's tech giants. ByteDance said that Doubao's daily token consumption in March 2026 had doubled over the past three months, as more people used AI agents and compute-heavy tasks such as video generation.

Bar chart drawn to scale from zero of Doubao monthly active users per QuestMobile: more than 157 million in August 2025, 345 million in March 2026, 382 million in May 2026, 419 million in September 2026

What Doubao can do

At its core, Doubao is a general chatbot. ByteDance has said that everyday features such as search and Q&A, writing and image generation, and voice and video calls will stay free, according to Jiemian.

A few features are more specific to Doubao:

  • Multimodal creation. WIRED, comparing Doubao with its overseas sibling, notes that Doubao can generate music and video content and lets users share creations on the platform, which the international app lacked in October 2025. The Seed team's video models include Seedance 2.5, covered in our Seedance 2.5 explainer.
  • Productivity tasks. Doubao Professional, launched on June 24, 2026, adds an office task mode that runs on the Doubao 2.1 Pro model. It can carry out agent tasks such as operating a local computer, using a browser, calling skills and running scheduled tasks, according to DotDotNews.
  • Phone-level assistant. On December 1, 2025, the Doubao team released a technical preview of the Doubao Mobile Assistant, an assistant built with phone makers at the operating system level, according to C114. The preview was offered on a limited batch of an engineering prototype phone, the nubia M153, made with ZTE. Doubao had said it had no plans to make its own phones and was in talks with several phone makers.

The models behind it

The Seed team ships its general models in generations and sizes. In its Seed 2.0 launch post on February 14, 2026, the team described three general-purpose agent models of different sizes (Pro, Lite and Mini) plus a dedicated Code model. It said the Pro and Code models had launched in the Doubao app and in TRAE, and that the full series was available by API on Volcano Engine.

The same post makes cost a selling point. The Seed team says Seed 2.0's performance is comparable to other leading models "while token pricing is lowered by approximately an order of magnitude." That is the company's own claim. It also says that "there is still room for improvement in some challenging and difficult benchmarks compared to top global models."

The next generation, Seed 2.1, followed on June 23, 2026, in two sizes, Pro and Turbo. The Seed team says it improves agent tasks and coding, and that Doubao and Volcano Engine users can access it.

Model names and versions change often. The Volcano Engine model page lists what is current.

Doubao vs Dola: the international version

If you live outside China, the app you are likely to see is not Doubao. WIRED reports that ByteDance released an overseas counterpart around the same time, under the name Cici. It is now called Dola. An Auton AI News report from July 2026 says the rebrand happened in November 2025 and names the operator as SPRING (SG) PTE. LTD., a Singapore ByteDance subsidiary.

Key differences:

  • Where it works. WIRED reported in October 2025 that Cici was region-locked and not available in China or the United States. Auton AI News reported in July 2026 that Dola showed US visitors the message "Dola is not available in this country or region," and that it was also blocked in Canada, China and Australia.
  • Which models it uses. WIRED reported in October 2025 that Cici's privacy disclosure said it relied on OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini for text, not ByteDance's own models. Which models Dola uses today may have changed since then.
  • Features. WIRED found the app design looked identical to Doubao's, with fewer multimodal and social features at the time.

So "Doubao" and "Dola" share an owner and a look. They are separate apps, for separate markets, under separate rules.

How Chinese rules shape Doubao

Doubao runs under China's rules for generative AI, which our explainer on how China regulates generative AI covers in plain English. One recent change shows how directly those rules reach the product.

Doubao used to let users build their own AI agents inside the app, including companion-style characters. According to The Next Web, those custom agents stopped working on July 15, 2026. That was the day China's Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services took effect, as The Next Web reported earlier in July. Users got a read-only archive until October 15, 2026, after which ByteDance said the data would no longer be viewable or recoverable in the app. ByteDance pointed users to Maoxiang, its standalone companion app, where they could build a new agent from scratch. The Next Web also reports that ByteDance said in 2024 that users had built more than 8 million agents on Doubao.

Alibaba made a similar move with Qwen, The Next Web reports, and Tencent pulled the user-built agent section of its Yuanbao app on June 30, 2026.

Paying for Doubao

Doubao has been free to use for most of its life. In May 2026, The Straits Times reported that ByteDance was testing three paid subscription tiers for premium features, and a Doubao spokesperson said a free version would continue. Some analysts quoted in the report linked the move to rising computing costs as usage grew. The paid tiers launched on June 24, 2026 as Doubao Professional, DotDotNews reported. At launch, the monthly auto-renewal prices were 68 yuan for Standard, 200 yuan for Enhanced and 500 yuan for Premium, and Doubao said free users would keep getting new models and features.

Check the app for current plans. Prices and tiers may have changed since launch.

Should you use Doubao?

That depends on who you are and where you live.

  • You are in mainland China. Doubao is the most used AI app there, per QuestMobile data, and the free version covers everyday chat, writing, image and voice features.
  • You are outside China. The Doubao app is built for the Chinese market. The international app is Dola, and it is not offered in every country. As of July 2026, it was not available in the US, Canada or Australia, per Auton AI News.
  • You are a developer or a business. The Seed models are offered through Volcano Engine. Check your own legal, security and data rules before you send company data to any cloud model, Chinese or not.
  • You care about data. Read the privacy policy of the specific app you use. Auton AI News quotes Dola's privacy policy as saying that AI models improved with personal information "may be utilised by entities within our Corporate Group." WIRED notes that ByteDance is still viewed in many countries as an extension of the Chinese government, which has led to concerns about data security and political propaganda.

The short version

  • Doubao is ByteDance's AI assistant and, by QuestMobile's count, China's most used AI app as of September 2026.
  • Its models come from the ByteDance Seed team, and businesses reach them through Volcano Engine.
  • Dola, formerly Cici, is the separate international app, and it is not available everywhere.
  • Chinese rules shape the product directly, as the July 2026 removal of custom companion agents showed.
  • For plans, prices and model versions, check ByteDance's own pages.

Sources

ExplainersChinaConsumer AILLM

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Edited by the llms.blog desk.

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