ByteDance the parent TikTok’s company has developed the AI bot that is now China’s most-popular chatbot: Doubao. The app, which was first launched in 2023, has reached the number one spot on the country’s AI-generated market. QuestMobile reports that the app had more than 157.5 million active monthly users by the end of August.
Cici, a Doubao-like app from overseas is less well known. Cici is a female cartoon app that was launched around the same period as Doubao. The only difference between them is Cici has longer hair. It’s region-locked, and isn’t available in China or America. This explains why the app is even more obscure.
ByteDance is quietly promoting Cici in Mexico, the United Kingdom and other Southeast Asian countries. Meta’s Ad Library reveals that Cici ran over 400 ads in Mexico during October. Most of them boasted the model’s math problem-solving abilities and its free use. The company is also running advertising campaigns in both the UK and Philippines. TikTok users in these countries posted dozens of videos sponsored by Cici, using hashtags including #ciciai.
Cici has seen an increase in downloads recently thanks to this marketing effort. Sensor Tower’s market intelligence data indicates that in markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia Philippines, Mexico and UK the app has ranked among the 20 most popular free apps downloaded on Google Play Store during the last 3 months. Cici, for instance, has been Mexico’s most popular free app every single day of the last week. Cici was Thursday the 9th most popular free app on Apple’s App store in the UK.
Cici doesn’t mention ByteDance at all in its app, or even on its site. But the Chinese company has previously acknowledged its ownership of both apps. to Forbes in 2024. Cici’s privacy policy disclosureIt relies heavily on the technology of other ByteDance platforms like PicPic, a photo editing tool, and Coze, a coding assistant. But when it comes to generating text, it uses OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini—not ByteDance’s proprietary large language models. ByteDance has not responded to WIRED’s comment request.
Cici’s app is designed in a similar way to Doubao. The AI can be contacted via text, audio or images. Users can also try out autonomous agents created by others. Cici’s social and multimodal features are less developed than Doubao: it lacks the capacity to produce music and videos, and its users cannot share their works directly on the platform.
ByteDance is still struggling to create another app that has the same impact as TikTok. Cici is far behind Doubao in terms of international reach, but this shows the company’s willingness to invest and make new users. ByteDance, without Chinese internet regulations, which block Western AI competitors, will be forced to compete against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
