AI promises a better tomorrow in China and around the world

It was great to be in Beijing this week to speak at Microsoft’s AI Innovate event—talking about what we are doing to help accelerate digital transformation with the cloud and AI.

Microsoft has a rich 25-year history of collaboration in China working with customers, partners, developers, researchers and universities. Nearly 20 years ago, we founded Microsoft Research Asia to build our family of global labs, bringing together the brightest minds around the world to solve some of the toughest challenges in computer science. Our team in China has worked with our global teams and contributed to nearly every Microsoft product.

It’s this kind of collaborative approach that the world needs to guide AI’s future development.

Why? Because the world is becoming a computer. Think about the sheer computing power that is getting distributed, and how it is creating rich experiences through our lives. In our homes and cars, in our cities and at work, across every industry, from manufacturing to health care—all will be transformed by data, cloud and AI. That's the incredible opportunity in front of us.  

A major aspect of this transformation will require creating AI that is more like us and better able to interact conversationally, like people do. 

27 years ago, Bill Gates had a vision of computers that could one day see, hear, talk and understand human beings. And we’ve been working to make it a reality. We’ve been on a journey with conversational AI, emotional intelligence and chatbots that I’m not sure anyone else in the industry has undertaken yet. It’s inspiring to see this coming to life today in China—perhaps more than any country in the world—with our advances in AI and perhaps most visibly with our extremely popular social chatbot, Xiaoice, who has had over 30 billion conversations with 100 million friends.

Most intelligent agents today like Alexa or Siri focus on IQ or task completion, providing basic information like weather or traffic. But we need agents and bots to balance the smarts of IQ with EQ – our emotional intelligence. When we communicate, we use tone of voice, word play and humor, things that are very difficult for computers to understand. However, Xiaoice has the ability to have human-like verbal conversations, which the industry calls “full duplex.” Using this skill, she has talked with over 600k people on the phone since we launched last August! And most importantly, we made sure people were informed that she wasn’t a real person.

This week, I announced some very exciting new developments and features for Xiaoice. We’re making her full duplex capabilities available for partners and developers to use in their applications. We’re also introducing new features to help Xiaoice connect with families. With input from parents and kids, she’ll be able create a 10-minute customized audio story for kids in about 20 seconds. Xiaoice uses a specific trained deep learning model to personalize everything from background music to story characters. The service is free and will be available across markets in Asia starting on June 1. In addition, we’re working with a non-profit organization to create the largest audio-book library with Xiaoice for children who are blind or visually impaired. 

The innovation and progress with Xiaoice has inspired us to introduce new social chatbots around the world. We have millions of users worldwide who love our chatbots—Rinna in Japan and Indonesia, Zo in the US, Ruuh in India. While people are having fun, chatbots serve a serious purpose: helping build EQ through conversations to advance AI.

We must push the boundaries of what’s possible with speech and language to advance AI. This is why I’m very excited to announce that Semantic Machines, a conversational AI company in Berkeley, California, will be joining Microsoft. They have developed a revolutionary new approach that uses the power of machine learning to enable people to engage with computers in a simpler, more natural way. We still have a long way to go to reach human parity, but we are very committed, and I know that our combined teams will make a lot of progress together.

AI will bring immense change—like nothing we have seen in our lifetimes. It’s incredibly exciting, but we also must be respectful of the enormity of AI’s impact on society. In the US, China, and around the world, we will have the opportunity to shape our own future through technology like never before.

Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I believe the future holds even more possibility for what we can accomplish together, with great care and responsibility, to ensure that a better tomorrow is shared by everyone.