ByteDance Releases Seedream 5.5 for Doubao, Doubao Work, and Jimeng

What happened

ByteDance released its Seedream 5.5 image generation model on November 9, with access through Doubao, Doubao Work, and Jimeng; its API is expected to launch on Volcano Engine Ark. Compared with Seedream 5.0 Pro, the report says Seedream 5.5 generates images faster, improves multi-turn editing and small-text rendering, and supports transparent assets. For 2K square-image editing, the reported cost is about 0.28 yuan per image, less than half the cost for Seedream 5.0 Pro.

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Reported by 3 sources

The story so far

ByteDance released Seedream 5.5, an image generation and editing model that is rolling out through Jimeng, Doubao, Doubao Work, and Volcengine Ark; developers can try it on Ark as Doubao-Seedream-5.5. ByteDance says the model can preserve unchanged image areas at the pixel level through up to 100 editing rounds and create native RGBA images with transparent backgrounds. A Pro version is planned. In his tests, Baoyu found that eight of 10 rounds of edits to a crowded tourist photo left untouched areas pixel-identical to the prior image, and all 11 edits to a talking cartoon avatar met his pixel-difference criteria. He also reported mixed results for multilingual text and opaque glass in a transparent-background image. ByteDance reports a severe text error rate of 0.4%, down from 2.8% in the previous generation, and says editing realism trails Nano Banana 2.1 by about 6%. For 2K square-image editing, the reported cost is about 0.28 yuan per image, less than half the Seedream 5.0 Pro cost. Under the API pricing model, text tokens are not charged.