❯ Doubao’s team is said to have worked through the Mid-Autumn holiday for six days to rush out a personal assistant, Spell, aimed at Meta’s Muse

An overtime post on social mediaAccording to a October 3 report by PEdaily, posts on social media say ByteDance’s Doubao team launched a rush project over the Mid-Autumn holiday, with integration testing due on September 27 and a trial version due on September 30, about 6 days in all, and several upstream and downstream teams cancelling their holidays. One post read: “First time working overtime at ByteDance on triple pay.” ByteDance has not responded.

What Spell isThe product is codenamed Spell internally, with “Xiaodou” as its planned product name, and is positioned as a personal assistant aimed at Meta’s Muse. According to Huxiu, Spell has been in internal testing since April and comes from the Doubao phone assistant team, so this was an urgent rebuild and not a start from scratch. Huxiu specifically notes that the overtime details are online rumor and should not be treated as settled.

The pressure from MuseMeta’s Muse launched on September 8, focused on doing things for users instead of chatting. It passed 900,000 downloads in six days and 3.4 million by September 24, and topped the US App Store. PEdaily says Tencent has launched a cloud personal agent, LightVela, and Alibaba has plans for a Qianwen personal agent, though none has made the business model work.

Copying may not travelPoe Zhao, an analyst who follows Chinese tech, said on X that he doubts such a product carries over to China, reading Muse as a product of the open web. In China, shopping, food delivery and travel live inside each company’s own app, and how much a personal assistant can get done depends on whether those apps open their interfaces.

▮ SIGNALA big company can rebuild a product in six days but cannot get other companies’ apps to open up to it in six days, so the bottleneck for personal assistants in China is access, not the model.