Doubao adds the new "utility bill payment" feature. Will it become the next super App?

According to Dujia, Doubao has added a new "utility bill payment" feature. Users can initiate utility payment instructions for water, electricity, gas and other daily expenses via voice or text in the Doubao App to complete the payment operation. Meanwhile, other life service scenarios are also under layout.

A person close to Doubao told Dujia that Doubao is gradually building service capabilities in daily scenarios including travel services and utility bill payment.

It can be observed that Doubao is continuously expanding the boundary of practical service capabilities of its AI products.

Compared with the two super apps WeChat and Alipay, Doubao does not follow the conventional idea of setting up various function entrances first for users to find and use. Instead, it takes the large model dialogue as the scheduling layer, and wakes up various real-world services through natural language instructions.

Dujia holds that this method is more convenient and has greater imagination space than the super apps in the last era — the services that can be displayed on the screen are limited, but the services awakened through dialogue are infinite, Dialogue connects everything.

Doubao may be evolving in the direction of a super app.

Doubao Continues to Expand Its Practical Capabilities in Life Services

Actual tests by Dujia found that when users directly issue instructions such as paying electricity bills and water bills via voice or text in the Doubao dialog box, the large model will pop up the corresponding service card, and jump to the exclusive utility bill payment page.

The interface divides three common payment categories: electricity bill, water bill and gas bill. But at this stage, the three services in some areas all show "not yet opened", while some other cities show all services are available, and some show partial services are available. The overall logical framework has been built, and the actual city coverage and service provider docking are still in progress. To complete the actual payment, permissions need to be gradually opened in the follow-up.

Compared with the payment functions of WeChat and Alipay, Doubao's solution adopts the opposite logic, letting functions find users. Users do not need to look for any icon menu, just issue instructions in spoken language or text, and the AI dialogue will directly call out the payment service card, jumping to the business page in one step. The whole triggering link eliminates multi-layer page navigation, and the action of "finding the entrance" is completed by the large model.

Of course, one point needs to be clarified: dialogue invocation only completes the triggering, the necessary subsequent steps such as binding the account number, confirmation and payment are still retained, and it will not directly deduct money and complete the payment with one sentence.

Will Doubao Be the Next Super App?

It can be found that Doubao not only iterates and optimizes the large model itself, but also continuously and intensively builds a layer of real-world service infrastructure outward.

From the successive launch of physical services such as travel and utility bill payment, we can see the direction that ByteDance is expanding the capabilities of Doubao: it is not limited to AI-native functions such as dialogue Q&A and text-to-image generation, but continuously migrates various real services within the group system to the large model dialogue layer.

In China's C-end large model track, Doubao is not the first player to transform AI from a chat tool to a service work platform.

Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen launched this "AI for practical services" route earlier. Relying on Alibaba's ecosystem including Amap, Taobao and Alipay, Qianwen has realized functions such as hailing a car through dialogue, ordering takeout, purchasing goods, and accessing people's livelihood services such as utility bill payment, forming a relatively complete closed loop of conversational services. The two products have similar logic: both try to abandon the traditional menu-based interaction of apps, and take natural language as the unified entrance for services.

However, their underlying ecological endowments are different. Behind Qianwen is Alipay's mature payment system, which can complete payment within the dialogue in many scenarios. In contrast, at the current stage, Doubao mostly invokes service cards through dialogue, and then executes subsequent business processes after jumping. The entire closed loop is still in the iterative construction period, and there are also service capabilities such as takeout that are not available at present.

So to sum up, Qianwen and Doubao have their own advantages: Doubao has Douyin, the super traffic center, which is a natural traffic position for it to quickly promote a certain function or service on the C-end; while Qianwen relies on the Alibaba ecosystem which has more complete offline government, enterprise and people's livelihood cooperation resources, enabling new functions and services to be launched on the app faster.

Who will be the winner between the two in the future, time will give the answer.

However, it should also be noted that at present, no matter it is Doubao or Qianwen, the conversational service has not reached a fully mature state, many functions are still in the stage of internal testing and gradual capacity expansion, and there is still a certain distance from large-scale popularization.

This article is from "Dujia", and is released with authorization from 36Kr.