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ByteDance adds AI assistant to office tool Feishu, joining rivals Tencent and Alibaba in workplace chatbot race

  • The generative AI bot Feishu Intelligent Buddy is being added to the office app to help users generate emails and spreadsheets or analyse PDFs
  • The Feishu bot is able to work off a number of different large language models as rivals bake their own home-grown models into their office suites

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Feishu announces the latest version of its office tool, Feishu 7, with an AI-powered virtual assistant in Beijing on November 22, 2023. Photo: Feishu/ByteDance
Ben Jiangin Beijing
TikTok parent ByteDance has launched the latest iteration of its online collaboration tool Feishu, now infused with artificial intelligence (AI) to help Chinese clients with workplace automation, as Chinese tech giants continue to push for more industrial use of generative AI.
Feishu 7, announced on Wednesday in Beijing, will help Chinese enterprises get “AI-ready” by integrating ChatGPT-like functions powered by various large language models (LLMs), according to Feishu CEO Xie Xin.

“We’ve seen AI is changing the way we work and push for the evolution of our organisations,” Xie said during the announcement. “It’s critical for entrepreneurs to ensure their companies can quickly adapt to and get ready for the fast-moving era of artificial intelligence.”

LLMs are the technology underpinning products like ChatGPT, which Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched a year ago, igniting a global AI arms race that has drawn in a slew of Chinese tech firms all building their own chatbots.

With the new version of its office tool, ByteDance is introducing another chatbot in the form of an AI assistant dubbed Feishu Intelligent Buddy.

The company says the virtual assistant will be able to help users summarise meetings and unread messages, as well as analyse content from PDF documents, videos and audio files. It can also be used to draft many types of work documents, including emails, spreadsheets, mind maps and survey forms.

By way of example, Xie said he need only ask Feishu Buddy to generate a spreadsheet for an “inventory management system”, which can later be fine-tuned with requests for new fields and table adjustments.

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