ByteDance has debuted a text-to-video mobile app in its native China that is available on the company’s TikTok equivalent there, Douyin. Called Jimeng AI, there is speculation that it will be coming to North America and Europe soon via TikTok or ByteDance’s CapCut editing tool, possibly beating competing U.S. technologies like OpenAI’s Sora to market. Jimeng (translation: “dream”) uses text prompts to generate short videos. For now, its responsiveness is limited to prompts written in Chinese. In addition to entertainment, the app is described as applicable to education, marketing and other purposes.

Anyone fluent in Chinese with access to the Chines apps via DNS and/or VPNs can “subscribe to Jimeng and make about 168 videos or 2,050 images a month at a cost of 69 yuan ($9.65) for a monthly subscription, 79 yuan for a one-month trial, or 659 yuan a year,” writes TechRadar, pointing out that Jimeng also has an AI text-to-image generator.

The new app generates videos and images that range from “cartoony” to “realistic,” TechRadar reports, sharing examples provided on the Jimeng website that demonstrate what the media outlets describe as “notable consistency” even across a compilation of multiple clips.

Jimeng AI was created by Faceu Technology, “a company owned by ByteDance that produces the CapCut video editing app and is available for iPhone and Android as well as online,” according to Tom’s Guide.

Tom’s point out that “ByteDance isn’t the only Chinese company building out AI video models,” noting that “Kuaishou is one of China’s largest video apps and last month it made Kling AI video available outside of China for the first time.”

Calling Jimeng a “one-stop AI creation platform,” Tom’s says “you can generate video from text or images and it gives you control over camera movement and first and last frame input … something most modern AI video generators offer” when provided the first and last frames.

PetaPixel writes that there is a lot of competition among generative AI companies in China, and that ByteDance appears to be positioning Jimeng AI “to rival well-known text-to-video platforms in the West,” including OpenAI’s Sora, Pika from Pika Labs and Google’s Lumiere, among others.