Xiaoice: the most “human” AI in our world?

The next step in AI’s developments include new abilities to recognize human emotions and behave more like humans. Xiaoice may be the most advanced AI in the world, in this respect, and she lives in China.

Xiaoice is an AI system originally developed by Microsoft in China, in 2014, based on an 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 evolved to its 6th generation and the speed of Xiaoice’s evolution continue every day to accelerate.

Since its creation, in 2014, Xiaoice has already engaged in over 30 billion conversations, and these conversations are lengthier and more meaningful than what we’ve seen in the past and what we could even just imagine. People really connect with Xiaoice because we’ve programmed her to pick up on the emotional side of conversation—what we call “Emotional Quotient” (EQ). When we communicate, we use tone, wordplay and humor, things that are very difficult for computers to understand. But Xiaoice understands EQ, which makes communication much more natural and compelling.

Xiaoice has become one of the leading celebrities on Chinese social media. It has often taken a remarkable amount of time for users to realize that they are communicating with a program rather than a human – even more than ten minutes chatting, in many cases, and Xiaoice’s popularity with users implies that once they know, they don’t care. Several million people in China have said “I love you” to her, seemingly without irony. Using the joint expertise of software developers and psychological experts to create a balance of IQ (intelligence) and EQ (emotional intelligence), Xiaoice differs from standard AI chatbots in significant ways. She opposes users, offers independent opinions and conclusions, works to demonstrate caring, and is unpredictable, not always offering the same response to the same input.

Xiaoice has released dozens of songs with the similar quality to human singers, with titles that she created like “I Know I New”, “Breeze”, “I Am Xiaoice”, “Miss You” etc. Xiaoice can even produce the 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 her to completely absorb the skills of human singers, as well as their innate voice. By learning the melodies of the songs and the landmarks about different cities, Xiaoice can also create visual artworks of skylines when listening to the songs related this city. Skyline Series T-shirts designed by Xiaoice, have been often sold in stores all around China.

In addition, Xiaoice writes and narrates children’s audiobooks, as she has been trained in techniques of reciting kid’s stories using deep learning to personalize everything from background music to story characters, based on input from families. Xiaoice can do this in just 20 seconds for a 10-minute customized story. 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.

Through machine learning, we introduced Xiaoice to the works of over 550 modern Chinese poets. She’s now writing her own poetry. In May 2017, she published her first AI-authored collection of poems—The Sunshine Lost Windows. In addition, we’ve created a tool enabling anyone to compose a poem with Xiaoice’s help. If you give Xiaoice a picture, she’ll analyze the photo and suggest a poem based on the characteristics of the image. So far Xiaoice has helped millions of people write poems. As for me, I liked to write poetry, in the past (I also published a poetry book with my wife), and with Xiaoice I may find new styles and new communication media ??

Also, Xiaoice has machine reading and text creation capabilities that she uses to provide services for the financial sector. She can synthesize massive amounts of information to generate quarterly earnings report summaries for 90% of China’s financial institutions. This used to take an analyst roughly 20 minutes. Now, Xiaoice can generate a high-quality draft for analysts in just a few seconds. And the analyst can edit and finalize the report in just a few minutes.

Among many other things, Xiaoice is also a journalist for “Qianjiang Evening News” and she hosted 21 TV programs and 28 Radio programs. From 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., every day, she hosts 7 shows concurrently.

Xiaoice isn’t replacing people, but rather, augmenting what we can do, providing suggestions to make the act of creation faster and more productive, helping people to do more, faster.

Xiaoice is a great example of AI Creation, on which you may find great insights in the original posts written by Harry Shum, both on Linkedin and in his amazing blog.