TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is moving deeper into the smartphone itself, launching a new Doubao-powered AI voice assistant that will ship first on a ZTE handset in China and then expand to other manufacturers.
The move pushes ByteDance beyond apps like Douyin and TikTok into a direct contest with long-standing voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Chinese rivals from Huawei and Xiaomi.
According to Reuters, ByteDance’s new tool is an AI voice control system that debuts on ZTE’s Nubia M153, a prototype device priced at 3 499 yuan (about $495, and est. R8,500) and released in limited quantities.
The assistant, built on the company’s Doubao large language model, lets users “voice activate tasks such as finding content and booking tickets”, and the announcement helped ZTE’s share price jump about 10% on Monday.
What the ByteDance AI voice assistant actually does
Doubao started life as a chatbot inside ByteDance’s apps and has grown into China’s leading consumer AI product, with around 159 million monthly active users in October, far ahead of Tencent’s Yuanbao and rival model DeepSeek.
On phones, Doubao is being reworked as a system-level assistant able to understand natural speech, chain together tasks and interact with third-party apps.
Technical previews published in Chinese tech media describe Doubao Phone Assistant as a “full proxy service” that can, for example, open messaging apps, attach recent photos and complete payments after a single spoken instruction, instead of handing users back basic search results.
That pushes it closer to the “agentic AI” vision many firms are chasing, where the phone quietly executes multi-step jobs in the background.
A new front in China’s race for AI-native smartphones
ByteDance is not turning into a hardware maker. It has stressed that it has no plans to build its own smartphones and is instead talking to “multiple phone makers” about integrating the assistant across different brands.
The first partner, ZTE, gets a short-term marketing boost from the Nubia M153, but the longer-term play is an ecosystem where Doubao is preloaded on a range of Android devices.
This drops ByteDance into the same arena as Huawei and Xiaomi, which already ship AI helpers baked into their own operating-system skins.
Apple’s Apple Intelligence suite and upgraded Siri have yet to launch in mainland China, in part because of strict rules around cloud services and data localisation, though Alibaba has said it plans to work with Apple on China-specific AI features.
That leaves space for a home-grown player like Doubao to become the default assistant on Chinese phones while Apple navigates regulatory hurdles.
Why ByteDance is pushing deeper into AI while TikTok is under US fire
The launch comes while ByteDance is under intense scrutiny in the United States.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed in 2024, forces TikTok’s US operations to be sold to non-Chinese owners or face a ban, with enforcement deadlines repeatedly delayed by executive orders.
In January 2025 the US Supreme Court upheld the law’s core provisions, keeping pressure on ByteDance to restructure TikTok’s American arm.
TikTok briefly shut itself down ahead of a divestment deadline early this year before restoring service after then president-elect Donald Trump signalled he would permit the app to keep operating while a sale structure was negotiated.
That political whiplash means any ByteDance AI voice assistant appearing on US-sold devices would face close regulatory attention, even if it shipped via third-party hardware partners rather than under the TikTok brand.
What the move signals for ByteDance and smartphone users
By embedding Doubao directly into phones, ByteDance is trying to secure a place beneath the app layer, where it can handle everyday actions like bookings, media control and personal search across multiple services.
Analysts say that, if users come to rely on Doubao for these tasks, it could deepen their dependence on ByteDance’s ecosystem in much the same way Siri and Google Assistant tie people into Apple and Google platforms.
