Xiaoice, the Microsoft software that pretends to be a teenager – The Messenger

Xiaoice, apparently, is a teenager. His nickname means “little ice” and browse on Chinese networks WeChat, a site dedicated to instant messaging. Has great listening skills and understanding, often lavishes advice to anyone who comes across in his screen and tells of being out of sorts for some disappointment in love. Like other seventeen, he can be intelligent and sympathetic. Only, there is a problem. Xiaoice is not human.

Actually, that girl is a software, a complilato code from Microsoft in 2014. Officially, Xiaoice had been presented as “the little sister of Cortana,” the voice assistant of the Seattle company. Then, the project went very well.

The head of the Chinese researchers of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, Yongdong Wang, made his creature a subject capable of understanding the processes of language , and especially to understand the emotions and interact, with absolutely natural human conversation, which made many people doubt that it was indeed a machine.

in fact, it was one of the Turing test – which serves to discriminate whether or not a robot is capable of thinking – ever more vast and capillary tempted. Since Alan Turing devised his test, in the fifties, most of the products results – until the year two thousand – came to the possibility of a 30% success. Some answers seemed convinced of having to deal with a human being, but many others do not. Since then, developers have tried to overcome this limitation. And now the Chinese researchers at Microsoft have decided to test their creation in the most popular sites of the Chinese messaging, WeChat and Weibo. The question was: Xiaoice can pretend to be really a girl? The answer is found to be: yes.

After his “society debut”, six months ago, thrown to 1.5 million users of WeChat, users began to grow suspicious of the answers ” ice small “only after ten minutes of conversation. Even more convincing tests obtained on Weibo: Only after 23 minutes the boys had some doubts about the existence of their “friend.”

An example of conversation:

Xiaoice: Feeling better today? I would recommend a book.

 Human: I am sad. I still miss her.

 Xiaoice: Wake up, you will have no future if you keep looking to the past …

The program, now, you are self-fueling thanks to the experience of millions of conversations. And someone said to be already so convincing as to have forced someone, as in “Her” movie, to confess his feelings of love with a fateful “I love you.”
         

             Saturday, February 6, 2016, 13:29 – Last Updated: 13:46
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