Microsoft is harnessing artificial intelligence research with computational power in advanced algorithms to bring about natural interactions between people and machines to extend creative skills.
While Microsoft research aims to infuse computers and systems with the ability to reason, communicate and perform skills akin to humans, with its deep investments in the AI field advancing the state of machine intelligence, and enabling computers to understand what they see; communicate in natural language, and interact with the environment.
The tools and services that result from this project is woven into existing and new products and made open and accessible to the broader community in a bid to accelerate innovation, democratize AI and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
Microsoft had recently launched a chatbot, XiaoIce in China, which now boasts of 500 million “friends” with over 16 channels for users to interact with it, including through WeChat and other popular messaging platforms.
XiaoIce, is Chinese for “little Bing” and the chatbot has almost convinced some of its users that it is a human being; having its own TV show, ability to write poetry, and does many interesting things, that has lend it a celebrity status.
Albeit, the skill of being able to conjure Chinese poetry from a couple of pictures may sound rather trivial, XiaoIce as Chinese language conversational AI is also able to interact with users in text conversations, and even call people on their phones.
The chatbot marks a notable leap forward in the capacity of AI to undertake such simple tasks; and as interfacing with the actual environment, it tends to help in improving the machine learning model as indistinguishable from its human counterparts.
Microsoft has clearly demonstrated that its Chatbot has the capability to handle basic voice conversations in Chinese, it’s now only a matter of time before it find its way to other language speaking countries.
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