Doubao

What it does

Doubao is ByteDance's consumer assistant. It answers in text or voice, reads long PDFs and web pages, generates images, and runs as a phone app rather than a browser tab — which is why it feels faster than most chat products on mobile.

It is optimised for everyday tasks in Chinese: summarising a document, drafting a message, explaining a screenshot, turning a paragraph into a picture. Ask it something that needs current market data and it will still hedge, because the retrieval layer is tuned for consumer queries.

Standout features

• Voice conversation that handles interruptions
• Long-document reading with page-level answers
• Image generation inside the same thread
• Mobile-first app with shareable chat links

Main job: Replace the phone's default assistant with one that can read a document and act on it.

Best for

Quick document reading, voice notes and image drafts on a phone, in Chinese.

Getting started

Start with the voice mode for meeting notes and the document reader for supplier PDFs. Save the three prompts you actually reuse as shortcuts, and keep a second assistant for anything that must be cited.

Watch out for

Watch out: it is a consumer product with consumer data terms. Do not paste customer lists, contract terms or anything covered by an NDA, and check whether your account region changes where the data is processed.