Facing the rapid development of the natural language-enabled AI chatbot market, the whole technology world seems to be standing still.
Witnessing the resounding initial victory of Microsoft and OpenAI, no one wants to be a laggard. Google entered the market with the Bard chatbot, Baidu has completed testing and officially launched the Ernie Bot chatbot, Snapchat, Instagram are also cherishing a chatbot of their own. Many big companies are ready to enter the market. This fierce competition, and TikTok is no exception.
A recent report from Bloomberg shows that ByteDance Ltd., TikTok's parent company, is currently focusing on developing an AI chatbot codenamed 'Grace' based on several different major language models. The company's internal testing shows that the chatbot will take the form of a pop-up notification, appear everywhere on the application interface and can support user interaction at all times.
Both the spokesperson and the project testing team requested anonymity because this is an internal project the company is implementing. News of such AI assistant development projects seems to be the first official sign that ByteDance is really serious about integrating advanced AI technologies into its platform.
Not long ago, there were reports about TikTok also developing another chatbot called Tako. Even so, Tako is currently just an instant messaging app integrated within TikTok, where users can ask questions and get instant answers. Tako appears on the right side of the app screen, above the user's profile and the like, comment, and save buttons. When clicking, users can ask Tako many questions related to the video or discover new content through chatbot suggestions.
Since AI services such as ChatGPT are not available in China, it seems that the country's technology corporations are now actively increasing investment in the field of general AI to gain market share, especially after the ChatGPT has shown its impressive potential since its launch last November.