ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has significantly upgraded its Doubao chatbot with a groundbreaking real-time interactive video call function announced on May 24, 2025, through the app's official WeChat account.
The new feature transforms Doubao from a conventional chatbot into a sophisticated digital assistant capable of providing real-time visual guidance. Users can easily activate this functionality by turning on their smartphone camera during a voice call with the AI. Once enabled, Doubao can serve multiple roles: a knowledgeable docent during museum visits, a gardening expert when examining plants, a culinary advisor while grocery shopping, or an analytical assistant when reviewing charts, graphs, and videos.
According to ByteDance, this enhancement is built on the company's advanced visual reasoning AI model, which effectively integrates visual and language inputs to support content creation and in-depth analysis of various subjects. The technology also incorporates online search capabilities to access up-to-date information from the internet.
This development represents ByteDance's latest achievement in generative AI, highlighting the company's growing expertise in creating multimodal systems that combine different types of inputs. Earlier in May, Doubao introduced a feature allowing users to convert photos into pixel art, while in February, ByteDance unveiled its OmniHuman-1 model, which gained attention for its ability to transform photos and audio into realistic videos.
With approximately 75 million monthly active users as of early 2025, Doubao has established itself as one of China's most popular consumer-facing AI applications. The platform's rapid evolution reflects ByteDance's substantial investment in artificial intelligence technology, with the company reportedly allocating over $20 billion in capital expenditure for 2025, much of which is centered on AI development.
As competition in the AI space intensifies, ByteDance's continuous innovation with Doubao demonstrates its commitment to maintaining a leading position in the rapidly evolving field of multimodal AI applications that promise to make digital assistants more useful in real-world, real-time scenarios.