ByteDance is promoting its overseas AI chatbot Cici in markets such as the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Indonesia through extensive advertising and influencer partnerships. The app, a counterpart to the popular Chinese chatbot Doubao, is region‑locked and unavailable in China or the United States. Cici relies on OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini for text generation while borrowing technology from other ByteDance platforms. It offers text and audio chat, image generation, and user‑created autonomous agents, but lacks music and video capabilities. Despite limited global brand visibility, Cici has climbed into the top‑20 free apps in several countries, reflecting ByteDance’s willingness to invest heavily in user acquisition. Leer más →

ByteDance’s Doubao app has overtaken DeepSeek to become the most popular AI chatbot in China, drawing tens of millions of monthly active users. Designed with a friendly avatar and deep integration with Douyin, Doubao offers text, audio, video, image generation and customizable agents. Analysts credit ByteDance’s expertise in viral app design and seamless cross‑platform sharing for Doubao’s rapid growth, while DeepSeek remains a more minimalist text‑only service. The company is now exploring extensions of Doubao into smart glasses, cars and other devices, signalling an ambition to broaden the AI assistant beyond smartphones. Leer más →

A new consumer‑AI report from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) charts the latest competitive landscape. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the market leader, Google’s Gemini, AI Studio, NotebookLM and Google Labs have entered the top rankings. Meta AI and xAI’s Grok are also gaining ground, with Grok reporting roughly 20 million monthly active users and a recent 40 percent surge after its latest version. Chinese AI products continue to dominate traffic in their home market, and a wave of newcomers is reshaping the mobile app list as platforms crack down on copycat services. Leer más →