In the face of the rapid growth of the natural language-enabled artificial intelligence market, the whole technology world seems to be standing still. Witnessing the resounding initial victory of Microsoft and OpenAI, no one wants to be late. Google entered the market with the Bard chatbot, Baidu has completed testing and officially launched the Ernie Bot chatbot, Snapchat, Instagram are also incubating a chatbot of their own… Many big players have been and are ready to step into the fray. This fierce competition, and TikTok is no exception.
A recent report from Bloomberg shows that ByteDance Ltd., the parent company of TikTok, is currently focusing on developing an artificial intelligence chatbot codenamed “Grace” based on a number of different major language models. Testing within the company shows that the chatbot will be in the form of a notification, appear anywhere on the application interface and can support interaction with users at all times.
News of such AI assistant development projects seems to be the first official sign that ByteDance is really serious about integrating cutting-edge AI technologies into its platform.
Not long ago, it was reported that TikTok is also developing another chatbot called Tako. Even so, Tako is currently just an instant messaging app built into TikTok, where users can ask questions and get instant answers. Tako appears to the right of the application screen, above the user’s profile and buttons to like, comment, and save. When clicked, users can ask Tako many questions related to the video or discover new content through the chatbot’s suggestions.
Since AI services such as ChatGPT are not available in China, it seems that the country’s technology corporations are now actively increasing their investments in the general AI sector to gain market share, especially after ChatGPT has shown its impressive potential since its launch last November.