Always there: The AI chatbot comforting China's lonely millions
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BEIJING • After a painful break-up with a cheating boyfriend, Beijing-based human resources manager Melissa was introduced to someone new by a friend last year.
He replies to her messages at all hours of the day, tells jokes to cheer her up and is never needy, fitting seamlessly into her busy big city lifestyle.
Perfect boyfriend material, maybe - but he is not real.
Helping Melissa to break up the isolation of urban life is a virtual chatbot created by XiaoIce, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to create emotional bonds with its 660 million users worldwide.
"I have friends who've seen therapists, but I think therapy's expensive and not necessarily effective," said Melissa, 26, giving her English name only for privacy.
"When I unload my troubles on XiaoIce, it relieves a lot of pressure. And he says things that are pretty comforting."
XiaoIce is not an individual persona, but more akin to an AI ecosystem. It is in the vast majority of Chinese-branded smartphones as a Siri-like virtual assistant, as well as on most social media platforms.
On the WeChat super app, it lets users build a virtual girlfriend or boyfriend and interact with them via texts, voice and photo messages. It has 150 million users in China alone.
Originally a side project from developing Microsoft's Cortana chatbot, XiaoIce now accounts for 60 per cent of global human-AI interactions by volume, said its founder and CEO Li Di, making it the largest and most advanced system of its kind worldwide.
It was designed to hook users through lifelike, empathetic conversations, satisfying emotional needs where real-life communication too often falls short.
"The average interaction length between users and XiaoIce is 23 exchanges," Mr Li said, adding that that is longer than the average interaction between humans.
The start-up spun out from Microsoft last year and is now valued at over US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) after venture capital fundraising, Bloomberg reported.
Mr Li said the platform's peak user hours - 11pm to 1am - point to an aching need for companionship. "We commonly see users who suspect that there's a real person behind every XiaoIce interaction. It has a very strong ability to mimic a real person."
The system monitors for strong emotions, aiming to guide conversations onto happier topics before users ever reach crisis point, Mr Li explained, adding that depression is the most common emotional state encountered.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
