Dola (formerly Cici)

Dola is ByteDance's AI assistant for markets outside mainland China. It launched in August 2023 as Cici and was renamed Dola around November 3, 2025 — the same app, accounts and history, under a new brand. It is free, runs on iOS, Android, Windows, the web and as a browser extension, and by the end of 2025 had passed 10 million daily active users, concentrated in Southeast Asia, Latin America and the UK. It is region-locked out of the United States, Canada, Australia and mainland China.

Overview

ByteDance runs two consumer assistants, and confusing them is the single most common mistake. Doubao (豆包) is the China-domestic app, which surpassed 200 million daily active users after the 2026 Lunar New Year. Dola is the overseas app — different languages, a narrower feature set, no China availability. The two share a technology lineage and a corporate parent, not a codebase-and-catalogue identity.

The developer of record on both app stores is a ByteDance overseas subsidiary, Spring (SG) Pte. Ltd., and the Android package name com.larus.wolf has been constant across the Cici-to-Dola rename — the clearest evidence that this was a branding change and not a relaunch.

Strategically, Dola matters more inside ByteDance than its user numbers suggest. CEO Liang Rubo named Doubao/Dola the company's headline priority for 2026, while conceding that ByteDance's foundation models still trail the global frontier. A 36Kr report on ByteDance's internal 2026 planning puts Dola's goal at 30 million daily active users by year-end, up from the 10 million disclosed on December 31, 2025, pursued through smaller, less contested markets rather than a head-on fight for Europe and the US. That target comes from a single origin — 36Kr, whose English edition is KrASIA — and ByteDance has not confirmed it publicly, so treat it as reported rather than official. The growth is easier to verify: since roughly October 2025 Dola has ranked among the top-20 free Google Play apps in Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and the UK, spent time as the number-one daily download in Mexico, and its Play listing now shows the 100,000,000+ install badge.

For a reader outside those markets, the practical summary is short: Dola is a free, aggressively localised general assistant that you probably cannot install, powered by a stack ByteDance declines to specify. Whether it is any good is a question its 10 million daily users can answer and we cannot.

A disclosure about this page. We have not used Dola first-hand — it is not available in our region, and store-level geo-restrictions are not something a VPN reliably defeats. Everything below is drawn from ByteDance's own store listings and website plus named secondary reporting, and is labelled accordingly. Feature descriptions are therefore what the vendor claims, not what we confirmed; you will find no judgements here about answer quality, latency or how well the translation actually reads, because we are not in a position to make them.

Key Features

• Conversational chat and search — open-ended Q&A in the same shape as ChatGPT or Gemini. The listing pairs "chat, create and search" without specifying whether search means live web retrieval, so do not assume answers are web-grounded.
• Writing and rewriting — drafting, editing, tone changes, and summarisation of articles, meetings and uploaded documents including long PDFs.
• Translation — the interface ships in 19 languages (English plus Arabic, Filipino, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese), with translation across many more. Nineteen shipped interface languages is a lot for a free assistant, and the markets where Dola charts are the ones that list covers — consistent with the small-language-market strategy the 36Kr reporting describes.
• Image generation and photo editing — text-to-image in multiple styles plus restyling of uploaded photos, a multimodal surface backed by ByteDance's own image research (see Seedream).
• Voice input — the listing advertises voice input for hands-free use; it does not describe a full spoken-conversation mode of the kind the domestic Doubao app has.
• Everyday task presets — meal planning, language practice, study help and similar consumer-facing prompts surfaced in the app rather than left to the user to invent.
• Browser extension — ByteDance ships a "browser AI copilot" build that puts the assistant alongside the page you are reading.

Notably absent overseas: video generation. ByteDance's own App Store feature list for Dola covers chat, search, voice, image generation, photo editing and summarisation, and does not mention video at all — unlike the domestic Doubao app, where video is a headline feature. That is an absence in the vendor's own copy rather than a confirmed regional block, so read it as such. ByteDance's video models reach international users through other routes: its creative apps and the Volcano Engine and BytePlus APIs — see Jimeng, Dreamina and Seedance and the Seedance model page.

How It Works

Dola is a thin consumer client over server-side models: prompts, uploads and voice go to ByteDance infrastructure, responses come back into a single chat window. There is no local inference, no self-hosting option and no offline mode — which is also why the privacy labels below matter. The App Store listing advertises cross-device use across iOS, Android, Windows and the web; how account sign-in and history sync behave in practice is not something we can confirm.

What sits behind that window is the interesting part, and it is not documented — see below.

Technical Details

The model behind Dola is unconfirmed, and any page that states it flatly is guessing. The evidence splits three ways:

• In January 2024 a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed that its overseas generative apps, Cici among them, ran on OpenAI's GPT through a Microsoft Azure licence.
• Later secondary coverage describes the overseas app as drawing on third-party large language models including GPT and Google's Gemini.
• Other sources say it runs on ByteDance's in-house Seed family — the same lineage documented on the Seed 2.1 (Doubao) model page.

All three can be true at once, for different features, regions or dates, and the 2024 statement is old enough that the stack has almost certainly moved as ByteDance's own models matured. ByteDance publishes no model card for the consumer app and does not name a version in-product. Until it does, treat the question as open.

What is documented is the surrounding stack ByteDance sells and ships elsewhere: Seed 2.1 for text and agentic work, Seedream 5.0 for images, Seedance for video. Those are the models available through Volcano Engine and BytePlus — Dola itself has no public API.

App-level specifics as of July 21, 2026: current build 14.3.0, shipped the same day on both stores, roughly 300 MB on iOS, listed under Productivity, rated 13+, with App Store privacy labels declaring identifiers used for tracking, user content, contact information, device and user IDs, audio data, and usage and diagnostics data. Release notes are generic — "We've improved your chat and creation experience through updates and bug fixes" — so version numbers tell you nothing about what changed.

Use Cases

• Everyday assistant in an emerging market — the core case, and the one Dola is tuned for: free, multilingual, low-friction, no subscription wall on a mid-range Android phone.
• Cross-language work — drafting in one language and delivering in another, or reading foreign-language material with the extension open beside it.
• Document triage — uploading a long PDF and asking questions of it rather than reading it end to end.
• Casual creative work — social images, avatar restyling, quick visual drafts where fidelity matters less than speed and cost.
• Studying and language practice — conversational drilling in one of the 19 interface languages.
• Competitive research — for anyone tracking Chinese AI going global, Dola is the clearest example of the strategy: free distribution first, in markets the US labs under-serve.

Where it is a poor fit: regulated or confidential work, anything needing an agent to act on external systems, API-backed automation, and any use inside an organisation with a policy on Chinese-owned services.

Integrations

Thin by design. Dola is a destination app, not a platform: web, iOS, Android, Windows and a browser extension, with account-level sync between them. There is no public API, no plugin marketplace, no Slack or Notion connector, and no enterprise administration. Developers who want ByteDance models programmatically go to Volcano Engine (China) or BytePlus (international), which are separate products with their own pricing and terms.

Pricing & Access

Free, with no in-app purchases listed on the UK App Store as of July 2026. There is no paid Dola tier documented in the overseas stores at the time of writing.

One correction worth making explicitly, because it circulates as fact: the paid monthly plans reported at 68, 200 and 500 yuan in May 2026 are Doubao's, in China — 36Kr describes Doubao subscriptions as ranging from free to ¥500 per month, while the exact three-tier breakdown comes from lower-grade sourcing. They are part of ByteDance's domestic commercialisation push — subscriptions plus a professional tier aimed at office work — and do not describe what an overseas Dola user pays. Given that "accelerate Doubao monetisation" is one of ByteDance's four stated AI priorities for 2026, paid Dola tiers are a reasonable expectation rather than a current fact; check the store listing in your own region before assuming either way.

Access requires a supported region. Reported available: the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, among others; some lists add France, Poland, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Argentina. Reported unavailable: the United States, Canada, Australia and mainland China, the last by design since that market gets Doubao. ByteDance publishes no official availability list, the secondary lists in circulation do not fully agree with each other, and the rollout moves — so the only answer that is current is the one your own regional store gives you.

Getting Started

1. Search for "Dola" in your regional App Store or Google Play — the listing appears as Dola (formerly Cici) or Dola: Smart AI Assistant. If nothing comes up, your region is not supported; a VPN does not reliably work around store-level restrictions.
2. Or open dola.com in a browser and use the web client; cici.com redirects here.
3. Create an account when prompted — the listing advertises use across iOS, Android, Windows and the web, so signing in is what ties those clients together.
4. Set your interface language on first run; one of the 19 shipped languages may suit you better than the default your store region picks.
5. Judge it on the three things it is actually built to do: a translation task, a long-document summary, and an image generation prompt.
6. Install the browser extension only if you want the assistant on every page you visit; it broadens what the app sees.

No payment details are requested at sign-up — the UK App Store listing shows no in-app purchases.

Limitations

• Region-locked. No US, Canada, Australia or mainland China. For a large share of readers this alone settles it.
• Undisclosed model. You cannot know which model answered you, cannot pin a version, and cannot reproduce a result against a documented baseline.
• No API and no automation surface. Anything beyond hand-driven chat needs a different product.
• Narrower than Doubao. Video generation and parts of the domestic agent tooling do not appear in the overseas build's feature list.
• Untested by us. Region-locking means this entry is documentary, not experiential — see the disclosure in the Overview.
• Data-privacy posture. ByteDance ownership carries the same scrutiny TikTok attracted, and the declared tracking identifiers are not unusual for a consumer app but are not nothing either. Employer policy may decide this for you.
• No published benchmarks. ByteDance releases evaluation numbers for its Seed models, not for the consumer app, so app-level quality claims — including its own — are unverifiable.
• Documentation is thin. Most of what is written about Dola online is secondary, occasionally recycled from the Cici era, and sometimes conflates Dola's specifics with Doubao's.

Alternatives

• ChatGPT — broader availability, documented models and versions, a real API and a mature free tier. The default comparison for anyone outside Dola's regions.
• Google Gemini — strong multilingual coverage and deep mobile and workspace integration, available almost everywhere Dola is not.
• DeepSeek — if the appeal is a capable free Chinese assistant, DeepSeek publishes its models and weights, which is the opposite of Dola's posture.
• Perplexity AI — a better fit when the actual need is sourced answers and research rather than open-ended chat.
• Doubao (豆包) — the sibling product, if you are in mainland China or evaluating the fuller ByteDance feature set.

Community & Support

Support runs through in-app help and the app store listings. There is no developer forum, no public documentation site and no changelog beyond the boilerplate release notes described above, so there is no reliable way to track what a given update changed. For background reading, our own coverage is Cici Is Now Dola: ByteDance's Overseas AI Assistant and ByteDance's Doubao: China's Leading AI Chatbot.

Sources

• Dola (formerly Cici) on the App Store — developer, version, languages, category, privacy labels, in-app purchases
• Dola: Smart AI Assistant on Google Play — Android listing, package name, 100,000,000+ install badge, version 14.3.0 (July 21, 2026)
• Dola browser extension landing page — the "browser AI copilot" build
• Pandaily: ByteDance's Overseas AI Assistant Dola Surpasses 10 Million Daily Active Users — 10M DAU (Dec 31, 2025), market rankings
• 36Kr: Four Key Propositions of ByteDance AI in 2026 — origin report for the 30M DAU target, Doubao's 200M DAU, the free-to-¥500 subscription range and the office-assistant pivot
• KrASIA: ByteDance sets four AI priorities for 2026 — English edition of the 36Kr reporting above; not an independent confirmation
• TMTPost: ByteDance CEO Says the Company's Primary Focus is Doubao/Dola AI — Liang Rubo on 2026 priorities and the gap to frontier models
• Forbes Australia: TikTok owner ByteDance quietly launched 4 generative AI apps powered by OpenAI's GPT — the January 2024 GPT-via-Azure statement