Now Xiaoice is "way less pure and way more intelligent," Lee says. It combines the friendliness that made her so popular in the first place with stuff that actually makes her useful and a desired way to find information. If you ask her for the weather, she'll give you an answer, plus maybe a funny anecdote drawn from social media about a pop star who got caught in the rain without an umbrella. With the JD.com integration, Xiaoice can suggest products and let users buy them straight from chat. Now she can assess a user's emotional state and provide advice accordingly, going so far as to help users with breakups. Then, as she gained in popularity, Microsoft started adding features that made her a little bit more useful. When you ask Siri or Cortana a silly question and get a funny response, that's "chit-chat." It doesn't serve a practical purpose, but it makes your AI assistants feel just a little warmer and friendlier. To Lee and Microsoft Research, "chit-chat" has a very specific meaning. "What if we stopped trying to be useful and just focused on chit-chat?" Chit-chat "I think we've all made valiant attempts to make this stuff useful," Lee says. The reason Xiaoice is so successful is she was born of a different kind of philosophical experiment: Instead of building a chat bot that was useful, Microsoft simply tried to make it fun to talk to. It's even evolved to become a nice little sideline business for Microsoft, thanks to a partnership with Chinese e-retailer JD.com that lets users buy products by talking to Xiaoice. But while Tay may have been a fiasco, Microsoft has had massive success elsewhere: The Xiaoice chat bot - pronounced "Shao-ice" and translated as "little Bing" - born as an experiment by Microsoft Research in 2014, reaches 40 million followers in China, who often literally talk with her for hours.Īt her most active, Xiaoice is holding down as many 23 conversations a session, says Microsoft Research NExT leader Dr.
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