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According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Doubao Work has officially integrated with multiple third-party models such as Kimi 3.1 Pro, GLM 5.3, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.In addition, Doubao Work has launched a limited-time discount for Doubao 2.1 Lite and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, reducing the consumption multiplier for these two models.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming recently provided a timeline at the all-hands meeting of the Seed team, stating that ByteDance is not expected to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in the cutting-edge AI field until 2029 to 2030 at the earliest. Zhang Yiming pointed out that the pre-training dataset used by the Seed large language model is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of top competitors. Doubao is the largest AI chat application in terms of user scale in the country, and the video generation model Seedance has also entered the ranks of the world's top models.When Seed 2.1 was released in June this year, the team admitted that the model still has significant shortcomings in high-difficulty open tasks and cutting-edge scientific research problems. In May this year, the company discussed raising its annual capital expenditure to a maximum of $70 billion, mainly for building AI data centers and other infrastructure. In August, it was reported that Seed is pre-training a large model with up to 100 trillion parameters, surpassing all publicly available large models in the country.Seed currently has about 1,000 R&D personnel, led by Wu Yonghui, who was recruited by Zhang Yiming from Google DeepMind last year. ByteDance has also launched a virtual stock "Doubao Stock" linked to the Doubao business. ByteDance plans to launch a personal AI assistant similar to Meta Muse in the coming weeks, allowing users to interact with AI through voice and virtual avatars and have it complete tasks on their behalf. The personal assistant project, internally codenamed Spell, began internal testing in April but was not officially launched due to the release of the Doubao phone and other reasons. It is now planned to be further integrated with Doubao.

On November 5, according to reports from BianNiuShi, Coze, the intelligent agent development platform under ByteDance, announced a phased discontinuation of its current enterprise version. Starting from November 30, the standard and flagship versions for enterprises will stop accepting new customer purchases; the old package on Volcano Engine will be discontinued on December 31 of this year, and the new enterprise package is planned to be fully discontinued by December 31, 2027.Existing enterprise customers can still renew and purchase additional seats, but the service period cannot exceed the discontinuation date of the corresponding product. According to the current announced arrangements, the adjustment targets are the enterprise packages, not the immediate shutdown of Coze as a whole. On August 24 of this year, ByteDance integrated the TRAE and Coze teams into the Doubao system, and the next day launched the Agent product brand "Doubao Work" aimed at productivity scenarios.According to the "2025 China Intelligent Agent Development Platform Market Share Report" released by IDC in June this year, by 2025, Volcano Engine (Coze) will hold the first position in China's public cloud intelligent agent development platform market with a revenue share of 19.3%, while Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Tencent Cloud rank second and third with 13.9% and 12.6%, respectively. Tencent's intelligent agent platform Yuanqi has already updated its service discontinuation announcement on October 8, stating that it will fully cease operations starting November 9, 2026.

The technology media outlet "DuJia" has learned that ByteDance's AI office assistant product Doubao Work has launched business-related plugins such as Douyin Life Services and is being promoted to enterprise users on a small scale. Users can now access official plugins like Douyin Life Services Management, Massive Local Push, and TikTok for Business through the "Plugins" page of Doubao Work.After completing the necessary account authorization, merchants can delegate questions regarding recent sales performance, advertising expenditure, and other issues to Doubao Work for data retrieval and analysis, and receive review reports and adjustment suggestions. "DuJia" observed on the plugins page that through "Douyin Life Services Management," after merchants authorize login to Douyin Customer and Business Insights, they can query operational data and generate review reports that include analysis conclusions and action suggestions.

On November 3, QuestMobile released the "China Mobile Internet Autumn Report." As of September 2026, the scale of monthly active users in China's mobile internet reached 1.281 billion, a slight increase of 0.9% year-on-year; the average usage time per user in September was 189.8 hours, a year-on-year increase of 6.5%. Short drama videos and short videos have become the core sources of growth in usage time, contributing a growth rate of 111.5% as of September 2026. In that month, the total net increase in usage time for short drama video and short video apps was 13.329 billion hours and 5.717 billion hours, ranking first and second in the duration growth track, while the net increase for AIGC was 978 million hours, with the total usage time for online videos declining by 1.38 billion hours during the same period.In terms of user numbers, the top three applications within the Douyin Group in September 2026 were Douyin, Hongguo Free Short Drama, and Doubao, with deduplicated total user counts of 1.029 billion, 430 million, and 419 million respectively, with Hongguo surpassing Doubao. The top three applications in the same period last year were Douyin, Jinri Toutiao, and Douyin Lite. The user scale of the short drama video industry increased from 10 million to 400 million in less than three years, with a compound annual growth rate of 443.1%. Douyin, Kuaishou, and their lite versions occupy the top four positions in the short video industry and continue to show growth.Specifically, in September 2026, Hongguo Short Drama had 430 million monthly active users, while Hongguo Comic Drama had 7.883 million, with a year-on-year growth rate of 268.7 times. The newly launched Green Bubble Short Drama at the end of September reached 156 million monthly active users. The Hippo Theater app had 30.8 million active users in September, a year-on-year decline of 40.3%; the user volume of the top ten short drama mini-programs has exceeded that of the Hippo Theater app, with Lianqu Short Drama and Ceylon Theater having 75.17 million and 45.67 million respectively. According to iiMedia Consulting, the market size of China's micro short drama is projected to be 50.44 billion yuan in 2024, reaching 67.79 billion yuan in 2025, and expected to be 79.33 billion yuan in 2026.

According to the latest rankings from QuestMobile, in September 2026, Alibaba's AI application Qianwen App reached 158 million monthly active users, a year-on-year increase of 5077%, ranking first in growth among apps with over 100 million monthly active users. In the domestic AI native app rankings, Qianwen ranks second, surpassing DeepSeek's 123 million, but still below the first place, Doubao, which has 419 million.This growth is related to Alibaba's large-scale promotion. In November last year, the Tongyi App was renamed to Qianwen. This Spring Festival, Alibaba announced an investment of 3 billion yuan to launch a free order campaign, allowing users to order milk tea and takeout through AI. The campaign link was widely shared in WeChat groups, and the system experienced delays due to increased traffic. QuestMobile data shows that on the first day of the campaign, Qianwen's daily active users rose from about 7.06 million to 58.48 million.The year-on-year growth of 5077% was also influenced by last year's low base. Based on year-on-year data, Qianwen's monthly active users were about 3.05 million in September last year. By March this year, Qianwen's monthly active users had reached 166 million, rising to 167 million in June, and then falling back to 158 million in September, a decrease of about 9 million compared to June, with a decline rate of approximately 5.4%.

Doubao Work announced the opening of third-party large model services to enterprise clients, with the first batch including models such as Kimi K3.1 Pro from Moon's Dark Side, Zhipu GLM-5.3, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Enterprise users can directly switch models in the Doubao Work dialogue interface, no longer limited to Doubao's own models.Previously, Doubao Work supported users to access third-party models independently, and custom access required users to settle fees separately with the model vendors. The tool invocation and product costs of Doubao Work are still consumed separately. This time, third-party models are directly included in the product's model selection menu, lowering the switching and usage threshold.

Phoenix Technology reported on October 22 that the latest "Refused Operation Application List" from ByteDance's Doubao Mobile Assistant has increased from 151 to 166 applications, with 22 new applications added.The newly added applications cover categories such as travel and business travel, recruitment and workplace, tools and health, and entertainment, including Didi, Didi Enterprise Edition, Air China, Huazhu Club, Lantu Automobile, related apps from Autohome, 58 City, Zhilian Recruitment, Zhiwukong, Keep, Roborock, Tides, Hikvision, Hupu, Mango TV, WiFi Universal Key, Scan All-in-One, Himalaya, and WorkBuddy within the Tencent ecosystem.This adjustment merges financial-related applications under a unified name and will no longer list them separately. Unlike before, where third-party application authorization was required, Doubao Mobile Assistant has changed to directly restrict operations for financial applications, covering areas such as banking, trust services, payments, internet finance, and credit. When this list was first published last week, it included a total of 151 apps.

According to "Reading Plus," the short drama application Hongguo Short Drama App, owned by ByteDance, has launched "Xiaoguo AI." This feature has undergone a period of gray testing and is now officially online, relying on the Doubao large model. It is labeled as Hongguo AI BOT within the app and is positioned as an AI assistant for finding short dramas, providing series search and recommendations. The report states that this is the first time Hongguo has integrated conversational AI into the user-end drama search scenario, beyond AI short drama production.According to practical tests by "Reading Plus," the main entry point is located in the app's search bar. Clicking it leads to the conversation page, and users can also ask questions in the comment section by @XiaoguoAI. The page features quick questions, such as "What short dramas are everyone watching?" and "What are the differences between male-oriented and female-oriented short dramas?" When users input keywords, it returns a list of suggestions, a trending short drama list, and series popularity. The AI responses can pop up short drama cards with play buttons, which redirect to the viewing page when clicked.This tool relies on generative models and search plugins to return information such as titles, plot summaries, poster stills, reputation ratings, and playback channels based on keywords and viewing preferences. From user feedback, it can also record update requests and push notifications when new seasons of followed series are available for reservation.

Liu Xing, the head of public relations at ByteDance, publicly questioned the claim that "over half of China's AI computing power is used for creating light-hearted dramas," stating that the related data is "somewhat unreliable." He revealed that only about 10% of ByteDance's total computing power is used for training and inference of video generation models, and this percentage also includes model development, not all of it is used for producing short dramas.The controversy originated from an investor communication record disclosed by Chinese Online in June this year. The company stated that 55% of domestic AI Token consumption comes from short dramas and video generation, 24% is used for e-commerce marketing, and software development accounts for only 15%. After this set of data was circulated, it evolved into the claim that "half of China's computing power is used for creating light-hearted dramas," leading to discussions such as "the U.S. creates the future, while China creates light-hearted dramas."

Doubao Mobile Assistant stated that the 30-day public announcement period for its "Screen Automation Operation Declaration Agreement" (SAEP) ended on October 14, 2026, and it will gradually lift the screen automation operation permissions for third-party applications. Applications that have explicitly declared refusal of operation permissions will not be operated by the agent.After the public announcement period ends, developers can still declare refusal at any time, and Doubao Mobile Assistant will provide feedback within 3 working days. This agreement is aimed at cross-application operations of graphical interface agents, allowing developers to declare their interaction strategies with the agent.

According to "Du Jia," Tencent Yuanbao is developing a Personal Agent product called "Yuanbao Assistant," and plans to launch a standalone app to support long-term tasks, personal long-term memory, and other capabilities. As of the time of publication, Tencent has not responded to verification requests. The report states that multiple business departments within Tencent, including social media, are also developing related products or features.Recent developments listed in the report include: on September 30, Doubao is rumored to launch a personal assistant app called "Xiao Dou"; on October 10, Ant Group's Lingguang app is rumored to be testing "My Life"; Tencent Cloud launched LightVela; at the 2026 Yunqi Conference, Qianwen announced the Personal Agent plan. The report also mentions that several teams started research and development months before the overseas Muse release. Currently, cross-app calls are limited, long-term tasks are prone to interruption, and privacy boundaries are difficult to manage, with most products still in a gray area or internal testing.

According to the WeChat public account "Du Jia," ByteDance's AI assistant Doubao has added a utility payment feature. Users can initiate payment instructions for water, electricity, gas, and other services through voice or text in the Doubao app, with other life service scenarios also in development. Sources close to Doubao told "Du Jia" that Doubao is gradually building capabilities for handling tasks in life scenarios, including travel services and utility payments."Du Jia" claims to have tested that after issuing commands for paying electricity and water bills in the dialogue box, corresponding service cards pop up and redirect to the utility payment page. The interface is divided into electricity, water, and gas fees, with some regions showing that services are not yet available, while some cities have fully or partially opened them. The relevant framework has been established, and city coverage and service provider integration are still in progress, with actual payments requiring further permission to be granted.Currently, the dialogue only serves to invoke services; steps such as binding account numbers, confirmation, and payment will still be retained, and users will not be charged directly with a single command. Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen integrated utility payments earlier and can complete payments within the dialogue; Doubao at this stage redirects to handle tasks after invoking the card, and capabilities like food delivery have not yet been launched. The above content comes from "Du Jia" reports and tests, not an official announcement from Doubao.

According to "Du Jia" reported on September 30, ByteDance's Doubao has named its AI personal assistant product "Xiao Dou" and plans to launch an independent app version. This name was confirmed during this summer and is currently still in the internal testing phase, with the final external version possibly subject to adjustments. Sina Technology reported on September 29 that Doubao is accelerating the implementation of personal assistant direction products, planning to deeply integrate the exploration project codenamed "Spell" with Doubao's existing products, with the new product expected to be launched externally relatively quickly. As of the time of publication, Doubao has not responded.From the perspective of the domestic Personal Agent track, Xiao Dou is a part of ByteDance completing the track. The main Doubao app is responsible for general conversations, Doubao Work is aimed at enterprise office use, and Xiao Dou targets consumer-level personal assistants. Previously, it was reported that Tencent was secretly developing Handy Bot, and Alibaba's Qianwen team also proposed creating users' own Personal Agents. Currently, there are no mature mass-produced resident personal agent products in the domestic market, with most still in internal testing or gray preparation stages.

On September 30, according to Yicai, Doubao, a subsidiary of ByteDance, announced that users can complete travel needs such as flight bookings, train ticket purchases, ride-hailing, and route navigation through Doubao. Users only need to describe their needs in natural language, such as "Help me book a flight from Beijing to Shanghai tomorrow" or "Call a car to Capital Airport," and Doubao can recognize the intent and invoke the corresponding services without switching between multiple applications.In terms of cooperation, Doubao collaborates with Flight Butler and High-speed Rail Butler to support flight inquiries, price comparisons, online bookings, and order management; it partners with ride-hailing platforms like Caocao Travel, and collaborates with navigation platforms like Baidu Maps. This news was reported by journalist Lü Qian, edited by Yu Jian.

According to "Dujia," Tencent is secretly developing a Personal Agent product called "Handy Bot" and plans to launch an independent app. Currently, the product has quietly launched a service account on WeChat, with the description "Your Personal AI Agent." Since the product is still in the internal testing phase, specific information is subject to official announcements.The report states that the industry is currently hotly discussing the narrative of Personal Agents, with Meta's recently launched Muse pushing the popularity of consumer-grade intelligent agents to new heights. Unlike traditional chatbots that are conversation-driven, Personal Agents are centered around human core state boundaries, where AI has a long-term operational environment and can receive macro goals to continuously advance tasks in the background. Meta Muse assigns each user an independent Secure VM (Virtual Machine) for security, isolating browser and web operations for tasks such as price comparison shopping, email processing, and itinerary monitoring.Domestic manufacturers are also entering the pre-research phase. The Alibaba Qianwen team proposed creating a Personal Agent for users at the Yunqi Conference, and ByteDance's Doubao has also been reported to be developing a personal assistant product, previously codenamed "Spell." The industry believes that implementation needs to balance model task planning capabilities, ecosystem tool openness, and compliance with privacy boundaries.

On September 29, according to a report by Phoenix Technology citing Sina Technology, Doubao, a subsidiary of ByteDance, is advancing its product planning in the personal assistant direction. Insiders revealed that continuing the strategy of last year's Doubao mobile assistant in the personal agent direction, internal testing of related exploratory products began in April this year, codenamed Spell, mainly led by the Doubao mobile assistant team, but has not been officially announced due to reasons such as the release of the Doubao mobile phone.The insider stated that as personal assistant products like Muse and Instinct have gained attention overseas, Doubao is also accelerating the external release of personal agent capabilities, planning to integrate the Spell project more deeply with Doubao products. The new product will be jointly managed by the Spell project and the Doubao dialogue team, and it is expected to be launched externally soon. According to "Big Factory Daily," the Doubao product line has received a new task during the Mid-Autumn Festival, requiring a rapid reconstruction of a product that benchmarks Muse, with a beta version developed by September 30 for internal testing, involving the entire Doubao product line and multiple upstream and downstream teams in this holiday development.Previously, the technical preview version of the Doubao mobile assistant made its debut in December 2025, first launched on the ZTE Nubia M153 engineering prototype. In September 2026, the consumer version was officially released, landing on the Nubia NaviX Ultra model. Reports indicate that Spell can be seen as Doubao's extension of the personal agent capabilities accumulated on mobile devices into an independent application form.

On September 27, Doubao Mobile Assistant released a statement in the official community regarding the abnormal usage of the Nubia NaviX Ultra phone in Honor of Kings, stating that starting from the evening of September 24, they have received feedback from users that the Nubia NaviX Ultra equipped with Doubao Mobile Assistant displays an abnormal device environment prompt when logging into Honor of Kings or during matchmaking, and users are forcibly kicked offline.Doubao Mobile Assistant stated: Upon confirmation, they have not made any operations on the Tencent game system throughout the process, and there are no violations such as unauthorized clicks, cheats, or simulation behaviors by the AI. The team is still in communication with relevant parties at Tencent, and as of now, they have not received a clear response, for which they apologize. The assistant also advises users not to repeatedly attempt to log into Honor of Kings on this model. If the account has been banned, users can appeal through the official game customer service channels.Tencent has not publicly responded. On September 28, a reporter learned from informed sources that Honor of Kings ensures game fairness through various security risk strategies, and these strategies have been consistently used over the past period without targeted adjustments.

On September 24, the trending topic "Doubao employees lament that Doubao has become a marginal product" topped Weibo's hot search. Previously, media reported that the Doubao General Session team had undergone personnel reductions. Following the dissemination of related content, statements such as "Doubao layoffs" and "half of the dialogue team cut" appeared online, with some claiming that internal employees lamented that Doubao was being marginalized.In response to the above statements, Doubao's public relations head Liu Xing posted a response stating: Some media reported that the Doubao Session team underwent organizational adjustments, and some self-media interpreted it as Doubao layoffs and cutting half of the Doubao dialogue team, which is inaccurate information; in fact, it is merely an organizational adjustment of responsibilities.According to Liu Xing, part of the functions of the Doubao General Session team has been split into the Doubao trading and Doubao work teams, with relevant personnel being transferred accordingly. Many employees are still engaged in dialogue experience-related work, such as optimizing the trading dialogue experience on the trading side. The team has fewer than 50 people, and the adjustment of responsibilities involves 11 individuals, of which 3 have left. He emphasized that statements in some self-media reports, such as "Doubao layoffs affecting 200 million users" and "half of the dialogue team cut," are inaccurate.

According to LatePost, the Alibaba Cloud Shadow team is developing an AI device called QwenBook, positioned as a native intelligent agent computer, resembling the Qianwen tablet. The project started in April this year, with a team of about 150 people, integrating models including Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-Flash. The complete product is expected to be released by the end of this year or early next year.The report states that QwenBook is similar in concept to the Doubao phone, both attempting to push the model to the system's core. After the launch of the first generation Doubao phone, WeChat, Taobao, Meituan, Pinduoduo, and others successively prohibited it from replacing user operations through screen reading and simulated clicks. The Nubia NaviX Ultra, which went on sale on September 16, retains the GUI approach, attempting to allow applications to open services to the Agent through MCP, A2A, or dedicated interfaces.