ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has built what is currently the most popular AI chatbot in China: Doubao. Launched in 2023, the app has risen to the top of the country’s generative AI market, reaching more than 157 million monthly active users by August, according to Chinese analytics firm QuestMobile.
But what’s less known is that Doubao also has an overseas counterpart: Cici. It was released around the same time and features a nearly identical female cartoon avatar as its app icon, except Cici’s has longer hair than Doubao’s. The app is region-locked and not available in either China or the United States, which explains why it’s even more obscure than Doubao.
But ByteDance has been quietly marketing Cici to users in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and several Southeast Asian countries. Meta’s Ad Library shows that Cici was running over 400 different ads in Mexico in October, most of which boasted about the model’s ability to solve math problems and the fact that it’s completely free to use. It’s also currently running ad campaigns in the UK and Philippines. On TikTok, creators in those countries have shared dozens of sponsored videos about Cici using hashtags like #ciciai.
Thanks to that marketing push, downloads of the Cici app have seen a noticeable increase recently. In markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, and the UK, the app has been ranking within the top 20 most downloaded free apps on the Google Play Store for the past three months, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. In Mexico, for example, Cici has been the most downloaded free app on the Google Play Store every day for the past week. In the UK on Thursday, Cici was the ninth-most-popular free app in Apple’s App Store.
Cici makes almost no mention of its ties to ByteDance anywhere in the app or on its website, but the Chinese company previously confirmed its control of the apps to Forbes in 2024. According to Cici’s privacy policy disclosure, it relies on technology from several other ByteDance-owned platforms, like the photo editor PicPic and coding assistant Coze. But when it comes to generating text, it uses OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini—not ByteDance’s proprietary large language models. (ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.)
The design of Cici’s mobile app looks identical to Doubao’s, too. Users can chat with the AI using text or audio, generate and analyze images, and try autonomous agents generated by other users. But Cici is less advanced than Doubao when it comes to multi-modal and social features: It lacks the capability to generate music and video content, and users can’t share their creations directly on the platform.
Since TikTok took off, ByteDance has struggled to produce another app with the same global impact. Cici’s international influence is still far from Doubao’s domestic dominance, but it shows that the company is steadily making inroads and is willing to spend on new user acquisition. But without the Chinese internet regulations that block competition from Western AI players, ByteDance will have to go head-to-head with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
