14 DAY TRIAL // Cortana is not Microsoft’s only superstar, as the so-called AI Xiaoice chat bot available on a series of local services has made it to public television as the host of the weather program.
Xiaoice serves as a companion feature on Chinese services like WeChat, Line, and Weibo social network and can help perform a number of tasks just like a human person, such as sending select emoji when receiving certain messages.
But Microsoft has pushed it one step further by using the AI service as a weather presenter on Chinese network Dragon TV’s Morning News show.
Xiaoice thus offered the daily weather report, which it automatically downloaded using Microsoft’s cloud services. It was then capable of analyzing this data and presenting it to the audience, all without human intervention.
“Xiaoice will enable deep learning in weather forecast and structuralize weather big data and meanwhile interact with live scenes to complete the broadcasting; through Microsoft's unique emotional computing technologies, Xiaoice can offer instant comments based on weather forecast data with her unique artificial intelligent style of emotional comments, featuring balanced levels in terms of IQ and EQ,” Microsoft explains in a press release (which you can read in full after the jump).
In case you’re wondering, Xiaoice’s name translates to “Little Bing,” and it is indeed connected to the search engine, as it uses Bing to search for information online that can be then interpreted by its AI engine.
