By Coco Feng
Social media giant ByteDance, owner of TikTok and Douyin, has launched a Yelp-like artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that recommends restaurants and provides summarised food reviews based on a user鈥檚 prompts.
The chatbot called Tanfan, which translates to 鈥渄iscover meals鈥 in English, is only accessible via the Chinese short video app Douyin, where users are also able to book restaurants and order dishes from certain eateries.
As of Wednesday, Tanfan had registered about 35,000 users, according to ByteDance data. Besides providing text information, Tanfan can also be used to compare selected restaurants and watch food video blogs.
Powered by ByteDance鈥檚 Doubao large language model (LLM), Tanfan marks the latest example of how China鈥檚 Big Tech companies are using their AI expertise to create consumer-focused applications. LLMs are the technology behind generative AI services such as ChatGPT.
The launch of Tanfan comes months after Douyin 鈥 with 880 million monthly active users in January, according to market research firm Analysys Qianfan 鈥 allowed selected users to initiate conversations with the popular Doubao chatbot, without having to log on to that AI app.
Other major Chinese internet firms have also implemented AI to help upgrade their offerings, particularly in the areas of retail, food and dining.
E-commerce giant JD.com, for example, earlier this year expanded into food delivery, as well as hotel and airline reservations. The Beijing-based company last month said the number of daily food delivery orders it processed had surpassed 25 million across 350 cities on the mainland.
Alibaba Group Holding in April strengthened its on-demand delivery business via Taobao Instant Commerce, which covers food and other goods such as electronics, clothing and flowers. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Douyin made its initial foray into on-demand local services in 2018, when it allowed online influencers to embed links to restaurants and stores in video clips on the app. Between 2020 and 2022, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Douyin also attempted to expand the scope of its business through features like hotel reservations and delivery of group-bought food.
The platform鈥檚 local services unit generated sales of 320 billion yuan (US$44.7 billion) in the first eight months of 2024, according to a report by Chinese media 36Kr. Although that number surpassed the platform鈥檚 annual sales in 2023, it was behind the firm鈥檚 2024 target of 600 billion yuan for that period.