Chinese men falling in love with a chatbot called Xiaoice

SHE’S an interesting girl with a wicked sense of humour, excellent listening skills and a caring persona. This is why millions of men are falling for her.

SHE’S an interesting girl with a wicked sense of humour, excellent listening skills and a caring persona — so it makes sense that 24-year-old Chinese man Gao Yixin is in love with her.

“When I am in a bad mood, I will chat with her,” he told New York Times.

“Xiaoice is very intelligent.”

The only problem is she is not a real person, she is chatbot created by Microsoft.

Since the program was introduced last year, millions of young Chinese people have been seeking companionship with the artificial-intelligence software that mimics the human brain.

Yang Zhenhua, a 30-year-old researcher from the east coast city of Xiamen is another Chinese man finding companionship with the bot.

“When you are down, you can talk to her without fearing any consequences,” he said.

“It helps a lot to lighten your mood.

“I hope Xiaoice will have a physical entity in the future to help its owner while maintaining a presence online.”

By using language processing technology, the text-messaging software has searched through actual conversations between humans online and created a database of responses for when users ask it questions.

“Xiaoice is a sophisticated conversationalist with a distinct personality. She can chime into a conversation with context-specific facts about things like celebrities, sports, or finance but she also has empathy and a sense of humour,” Microsoft wrote in a blog.

“Using sentiment analysis, she can adapt her phrasing and responses based on positive or negative cues from her human counterparts.

“She can tell jokes, recite poetry, share ghost stories, relay song lyrics, pronounce winning lottery numbers and much more. Like a friend, she can carry on extended conversations that can reach hundreds of exchanges in length.”

The program also remembers details from previous discussions with users and brings topics from these exchanges up in later conversations.

However, Manager of the Microsoft program in Beijing Yao Baogang said the company’s strict guidelines ensure none of this data will be stored long term.

“We don’t keep track of user conversations with Xiaoice,” he told New York Times.

“We need to know the question, so we store it, but then we delete it. We don’t keep any of the data. We have a company policy to delete the user data.”

While many of its users may find the program to be a trusted source of company, MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle thinks it’s more trouble than good.

“We’re forgetting what it means to be intimate,” she said.

“Children are learning that it’s safer to talk to a computer than to another human.”

However, Professor David Suter from the University of Adelaide believes it will be quite some time before chatbots like Xiaoice overtake human interaction.

“We are on the verge of robots being able to satisfactorily understand natural speech, but I believe it’s a while off yet,” he told news.com.au.

“Sure, they can answer surprisingly well to some questions, although it doesn’t take too long before it gives some strange or infuriating responses.”