The Doubao chatbot from ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, has outperformed its competitor from Baidu to become the most popular chatbot in China. This was reported by Bloomberg.
Doubao surpassed Ernie Bot in terms of downloads last year. ByteDance's chatbot was downloaded 9 million times, while Baidu's was downloaded 8 million times. Doubao also now has more regular monthly users on iOS, which now stands at around 4 million, according to Sensor Tower data.
The data does not include the number of downloads on Android, but last week ByteDance announced that its chatbot has 26 million active monthly users on smartphones and PCs. At the same time, ChatGPT has 6.7 million active users on smartphones in the US.
According to Sensor Tower, Ernie is the only one among the top five most popular chatbots in China that offers a paid subscription, but since its launch in March 2023, it has generated less than $500 thousand from in-app purchases and subscribers.
Now, the biggest growth driver for chatbots is expected to be advertising and cloud services, which, according to Baidu, will bring in several billion yuan in additional revenue this year.