ByteDance Doubao to launch standalone office app next week to rival Tencent WorkBuddy
On Aug 22 First Financial Xinpi reported Doubao team will split the Work Task mode into a standalone office app as soon as next week, directly targeting Tencent WorkBuddy. Doubao shipped mobile remote PC, Windows virtual desktop, skill store and connectors over the past week.
On August 22, First Financial Xinpi reported that ByteDance's AI product Doubao team will release a standalone office app as soon as next week. The product is not built from scratch but rather split off from the Work Task mode that Doubao App has been embedding internally since June, becoming an independent office entry point. The Doubao web interface now shows two side-by-side entry options: New Work Task and New Conversation.
Over the past week Doubao shipped a dense cluster of office-oriented updates: on August 17 it added mobile remote control of a PC, on August 18 it shipped Windows Virtual Desktop enabling AI to execute tasks inside an isolated environment, and on August 21 it launched a Skill Store, connectors and Work Partners covering more than 200 ready-made skills, with connectors for Feishu, DingTalk and WeCom. The combined set maps to the full chain an AI agent needs: virtual desktop for execution environment, PC control for action capability, and Skill Store plus connectors for ecosystem integration.
On the organizational side, ByteDance completed the merger of its Feishu team into the Doubao team on July 30. At the company's mid-year all-hands on August 6, CEO Liang Rubo made clear that Doubao is being cultivated as ByteDance's new AI backbone and that resources will tilt toward AI, information platforms and transaction services. More AI products will be consolidated under Doubao, while Feishu's existing services stay online, but Feishu's years of accumulated document and permission-management capabilities are being broken down into plug-in primitives the model can call at any time.
On competition, 2026 has been called the Year of the Desktop Agent by Chinese industry analysts, with ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba forming a three-way race. Tencent's WorkBuddy has grown rapidly since its March launch, with Analysys data showing 2097K desktop monthly visits in June, well above the combined total of ByteDance TRAE and Alibaba QoderWork. Pony Ma described it on the earnings call as "the most widely used productivity AI agent service in China". Doubao's move to launch a standalone office app is widely read as a direct response to that positioning.