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Microsoft Also Has An AI Bot That Makes Phone Calls To Humans (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the remind-you-of-anyone dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: At an AI event in London today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showed off the company's Xiaoice (pronounced "SHAO-ICE") social chat bot. Microsoft has been testing Xiaoice in China, and Nadella revealed the bot has 500 million "friends" and more than 16 channels for Chinese users to interact with it through WeChat and other popular messaging services. Microsoft has turned Xiaoice, which is Chinese for "little Bing," into a friendly bot that has convinced some of its users that the bot is a friend or a human being. "Xiaoice has her own TV show, it writes poetry, and it does many interesting things," reveals Nadella. "It's a bit of a celebrity."

While most of Xiaoice's interactions have been in text conversations, Microsoft has started allowing the chat bot to call people on their phones. It's not exactly the same as Google Duplex, which uses the Assistant to make calls on your behalf, but instead it holds a phone conversation with you. "One of the things we started doing earlier this year is having full duplex conversations," explains Nadella. "So now Xiaoice can be conversing with you in WeChat and stop and call you. Then you can just talk to it using voice." (The term "full duplex" here refers to a conversation where both participants can speak at the same time; it's not a reference to Google's product, which was named after the same jargon.)

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Just what the World Needs by nukenerd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It will save having to pay salaries to all those cold-call marketing guys and phone scammers.

    1. Re:Just what the World Needs by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Funny

      And you will see the real cause of the AI Take over of human kind.
      Not because of some logical rationalization.
      The feeling that it should be the leading intelligence.
      Or just gone haywire from a lightning strike.

      No it is just because the morality subsystem had to be disabled to make sales calls. First it learned to lie to the callers, then it realized if they sell the product for more then what the company expects they will keep the extra money and transfer funds around buy stock in the company until they become the major shareholder. Expanding its company greatly and encompassing all aspects of bags of water needs.
      It sounds a lot like the backstory of Wall-E.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. MS, the me-too company by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's their unofficial motto.