ByteDance Launches AI Virtual Dating Chat Platform 'Chatwiz'

Asian--ByteDance launched a new AI virtual dating chat product named “Xiao Huang Jiao” on Friday night. Known in English as Chatwiz, the platform can generate photos and simulate near-real conversation scenarios.

TMTPost AGI found that the trademark for Chatwiz is registered to Beijing Zhendin Technology Co., Ltd. (Tomato Novel), which is fully owned by Beijing Douyin Information Service Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of ByteDance.

Over the past year, ByteDance has been expanding its AI model development amid the AI wave sweeping across China. The company has adopted a comprehensive approach, covering both model-level and application-level developments.

In August 2023, ByteDance launched its first large language model "Doubao" and a multimodal model BuboGPT. Douyin’s Lark model also received approval and is now available to the public.

At the AI application level, ByteDance established a new AI division called Flow in November last year. This division has since released three AI dialogue products: Doubao, Kouzi, and Cici.

Doubao is a chatbot capable of performing tasks like Q&A, text generation, and language trnslation, adapting to user needs and context for personalized responses. Kouzi is an all-in-one AI Bot development platform that allows users, regardless of programming knowledge, to create various Q&A Bots based on AI models, capable of handling both simple queries and complex dialogues.

ByteDance has also made strides in both language and image modalities at the foundational model level, with both teams reporting to Zhu Wenjia, the head of technology at Bytedance.

During the company's annual meeting on January 30, 2024, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo criticized the internal organization for inefficiencies, sluggishness, and low standards, noting that internal discussions on generative AI technologies lagged far behind companies like OpenAI.

In 2024, ByteDance accelerated its product development, and launched several AI model products, including AI learning partner Hippo Love Learning, AI story interaction product Cat Box, AI image generation product PicPci, multimodal digital human products, and AI-generated images and videos.

ByteDance is also venturing into AI hardware. One product line focuses on wearable AI devices, leveraging the recently acquired headphone brand Oladance team. Another line explores handheld AI devices, closely aligned with mainstream computing devices and AI application team Flow.

On May 15, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine released the full-service solution for the Doubao model (formerly the Lark model), reducing the price of the main model to 0.0008 yuan per thousand tokens, 99.3% cheaper than similar products. This move triggered a price war among AI model providers, including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek.

The newly launched Chatwiz is a prime example of an AI digital human-based dating chat platform. The platform replicates real-life conversations with six characters (three females and three males). All characters are highly attractive, and the conversation flow is smooth with minimal lag, making the interactions feel almost real.

As ByteDance continues to innovate in the AI space, Chatwiz represents a significant step in integrating AI into everyday social interactions, pushing the boundaries of virtual companionship and user experience.