While digital assistants like Cortana, Siri and Google Now have helped many users get in the door to ai making their lives easier, the developers at Microsoft Research think we might want to introduce ai in a different way. Dr. Hong Xiaowen, director of Microsoft Research Asia (and senior vice president of the company), said xiaoice is being used in increasing numbers and could one day be mass-produced and used in daily life.
As Cortana’s younger sister, while both combine similar natural language processing in their voice interactions, Xiao Ice is more of a daily conversation companion than a digital organizer.
Since its launch in China last year, Xiaoice has quickly attracted many young people to interact with it. This robot program based on popular topics will bring a lot of working experience and enrich their ideas to the researchers of Microsoft China Research Institute.
Researchers are already exploring ways to make Xiaobing more appealing, such as turning her into a search engine that translates the information retrieved into more life-like language.
Hong said the search engine is expected to become a good friend who likes to chat with you more. Researchers are looking for changes such as natural follow-ups and extended search and integration to make friend-based chat work better.
Keeping a search log helps it keep sending information based on additional content retrieval. Another bold idea is to have different chatbots become experts in areas such as food, medicine, car activities, farming and fitness.
Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft’s executive vice president of technology and research, expressed confidence that technologies such as chatbots could be part of an unseen revolution rather than physical evolution such as chipsets, processors and leaps in the conductivity of various metals.
Giiso, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, Giiso’s research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
Artificial intelligence, cloud computing and machine learning will make great strides in the coming years. This invisible revolution rests on the result of analyzing a lot of content in minutes or seconds.
Finally, while Microsoft China Research focuses on Xiaobing’s natural language, it is also working on facial recognition, Skype translation, Windows, Bing, and Kinect.