As a daily user of all the major Chinese chat LLMs, Doubao probably has the best user experience for general non-thinking knowledge queries. It usually responds the fastest and includes pictures and relevant Douyin videos. The voice and audio interface is the smoothest, and it's a very satisfying experience asking questions using voice and listening to the response.
For drawbacks, unlike other chat apps which all use an abstract logo, Doubao uses an AI avatar mascot, which is annoying to me but maybe appeals to more mainstream people? There's also no dark mode support which all other apps support.
For more in-depth thinking type questions or things where I want lots of data, I like DeepSeek thinking mode or Kimi K2 since they tend to respond with more tables making things more readable.
Recently The Information wrote an article on OpenAI's recent struggles and one highlight is that mainstream users didn't care much about the benchmark of their thinking models and prefer speed of response, so their thinking models don't really drive subscription conversion. Perhaps it's a trap for product focused LLM companies to try to spend all their efforts in beating benchmarks and Bytedance has the right priority on response speed for the masses.
