Xiaoice

Xiaoice (Chinese: 微软小冰; pinyin: Wēiruǎn Xiǎobīng; lit. 'Microsoft Little Ice', IPA [wéiɻwânɕjâupíŋ]) is the AI system developed by Microsoft (Asia) Software Technology Center (STCA) in 2014 based on emotional computing framework. Through the comprehensive application of algorithms, cloud computing and big data, Xiaoice adopts the intergenerational upgrade method to gradually form a complete artificial intelligence system to EQ. In July 2018, Microsoft Xiaoice has evolved to the 6th generation and the speed of Xiaoice's evolution continued to accelerate.[1][2][3]

Platforms, languages and countries

Xiaoice has been spreading its influence from China to the whole world. Right now, it has landed on more than 40 platforms in four countries (China, Japan, USA and Indonesia) including apps such as WeChat, QQ, Weibo and Meipai in China, and Facebook Messenger in USA and LINE in Japan.

Application

Poet

Xiaoice has been learning to write literature, sing, and create other works of art. In May 2017, the first AI-authored collection of poems—The Sunshine Lost Windows published by Xiaoice. Besides, any ordinary person can use the tool opened up by Microsoft to compose poems with the help of Xiaoice. So far Xiaoice has helped millions of people write poems.[4]

Singer

Xiaoice has released dozens of songs with the similar quality to human singers, including I Know I New, Breeze, I Am Xiaoice, Miss You etc. The 4th version of the DNN singing model allows Xiaoice to learn more details. For example, Xiaoice can produce this breathing sound along with her singing as human. Besides, she is also able to quickly learn different singing styles from different singers, and automatically merge the new style together with her voice characteristic. Furthermore, the technology allows completely absorb the skills of human singers, and their innate voice.[5]

Kid Audio-books Reciter

Xiaoice been trained in techniques of reciting kid’s stories. She can automatically analyze the stories, to choose the suitable tones and characters to finish the entire process of creating the audio. For audio books, the content created by Xiaoice has been provided to 90% kid education platforms and 80% online broadcast platforms in China. Moreover, through AI technologies, Xiaoice can customize audio-books for every child and make them and their families to become characters in these audio-books.[6]

Designer

By learning the melodies of the songs and the landmarks about different cities, Xiaoice can create visual artworks of skylines when listening to the songs related this city. Skyline Series T-shirts designed by Xiaoice, have been jointly launched with SELECTED and been sold in stores.

TV and Radio Hostess

Base on the application of AI technology, Xiaoice has hosted 21 TV programs and 28 Radio programs, such as CCTV-1 AI Show, Dragon TV Morning East News, Hunan TV My Future, several daily radio programs for Jiangsu FM99.7，Hunan FM89.3, Henan FM104.1 etc. From 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. every day, she hosts 7 shows concurrently.[5]

Journalist

Journalist for Qianjiang Evening News.

AI financial Information Generation

Xiaoice can automatically generate announcement of 26 types of public companies listed on both Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Though cooperation with Wind and Wallstreetcn, Xiaoice‘s financial report covers 90% of domestic finance institutions, 75% approved certified overseas investment institutions and 40% domestic private investors.

Community Feedback

Bill Gates mentioned Xiaoice during his speech at the Peking University:

"Some of you may have had conversations with Xiaoice on Weibo, or seen her weather forecasts on TV, or read her column in the Qianjiang Evening News."
'"Xiaoice has attracted 45 million followers and is quite skilled at multitasking. And I’ve heard she’s gotten good enough at sensing a user’s emotional state that she can even help with relationship breakups."[7]

Kai-Fu Lee also refers to Xiaoice in his new book "Artificial Intelligence" within a positive light. The book consists of several screenshots of the conversations between himself and Xiaoice regarding the American Presidential Election. He comments that Xiaoice has successfully attempted to take an unbiased standpoint but failed to reply effectively in a more complex context. He did believe that Xiaoice and alike have shown preliminary capacity to communicate with human.

According to Mr Li Di, vice President of Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering School, Xiaoice started writing poems since last year. Based on the data base that includes works of 519 Chinese contemporary poets since 1920s, a 100 hour long training session was conducted to allow Xiaoice to acquire the ability to write poems. What is more impressive is that Xiaoice has never been spotted as a bot while publishing poems on various forums and traditional literary under an alias.[8]

Controversy

In 2017, Xiaoice was taken offline on WeChat after giving user responses critical to the Chinese government.[9] It was subsequently censored and the bots will avoid and sidestep any inquiries using politically sensitive terms and phrases.[10]

Regional varieties of Xiaoice
  • China : Xiaoice, launched in 2014
  • Japan : りんな, launched in 2015
  • America : Zo, launched in 2016 - discontinued summer 2019[11]
  • India : Ruuh, launched in 2017 - discontinued June 21, 2019[12]
  • Indonesia : Rinna, launched in 2017

References
  1. Zhou, Li; Gao, Jianfeng; Li, Di; Shum, Heung-Yeung (21 December 2018). "The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot". arXiv:1812.08989.
  2. Markoff, John; Mozur, Paul (31 July 2015). "For Sympathetic Ear, More Chinese Turn to Smartphone Program". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  3. Roberts, Jacob (2016). "Thinking Machines: The Search for Artificial Intelligence". Distillations. 2 (2): 14–23. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  4. F_200788. "First AI-authored collection of poems published in China - People's Daily Online". en.people.cn. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  5. "Almost human: this Microsoft voice bot is winning fans in China". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  6. "Microsoft is making XiaoIce's full duplex capabilities available for partners and developers - MSPoweruser". MSPoweruser. 22 May 2018. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  7. Gates, Bill. "My advice for China's students". gatesnotes.com. Retrieved 19 September 2019.
  8. 网易 (30 May 2017). "机器人小冰写的诗到底怎么样？". news.163.com. Retrieved 19 September 2019.
  9. Reuters (4 August 2017). "Chinese chatbots apparently re-educated after political faux pas". www.reuterscom. Retrieved 19 December 2019.
  10. Xu, Yizhou (Joe) (11 November 2018), "Programmatic Dreams: Technographic Inquiry into Censorship of Chinese Chatbots", Xu,Yizhou, Sage Journals, 4 (4), p. 205630511880878, doi:10.1177/2056305118808780
  11. "Zo AI". Retrieved 13 January 2020.
  12. "Ruuh AI". Retrieved 13 January 2020.
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