TikTok owner ByteDance has entered the race against Apple to define the future of smartphones by putting its artificial intelligence agent Doubao into a ZTE-made handset.
The Beijing-based company on Monday, December 1, launched the Doubao Mobile Assistant in a technical preview,” SCMP reported.
The company described it as “an operating-system-level collaboration between ByteDance’s Doubao (AI model) and mobile phone manufacturers” that “brings more convenient interaction and richer capabilities.
A video demonstration showed how the assistant could tell a story from a picture, edit the pedestrians out of a photo, identify the lowest price of the same product on multiple shopping apps and make purchases with the user’s consent.
It could also book restaurants and transport as well as add the latest podcast episode to a playlist. All the functions could be activated via voice commands.
To showcase the technology, ByteDance has partnered with Chinese telecoms giant ZTE to release a limited-run “engineering prototype”: the Nubia M153. Priced at 3,499 yuan (US$494). The device features a 6.78-inch screen and a 50 million-pixel triple-camera system on the back and runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor.
Users can call up the assistant by pressing a dedicated AI button on the side of the device.
The two companies acknowledged that the device’s software, particularly the camera system, “cannot guarantee the functional completeness of a mature mobile product” and may lag behind mainstream flagships.
To address this, they have committed to a robust update schedule, with new software versions released every two weeks through the end of March 2026.
Gan Lin from the Doubao Mobile Assistant team said in the video on social media, “It’s been more than a decade since Apple launched Siri in 2011. In 2022, the release of ChatGPT inspired the entire industry to reimagine the potential of mobile voice assistants, and we were part of this collective journey. Thus, we launched the Doubao Mobile Assistant project last year.”
The move is the latest effort by ByteDance to find its footing in the smartphone industry.
