XiaoIce, an artificial intelligent chatbot developed by Microsoft to communicate with Chinese residents on social networks, is now doing morning weather reports on TV. Earlier this month, XiaoIce was introduced as a "trainee" weather host on the Chinese live TV show, "Morning News".
In announcing the appearance of Xiaolce on the news show, Microsoft stated:
"This is a vital breakthrough in the history of scientific technology and television, which also makes "Morning News" the first live TV programme around the world that has been integrated with the cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies."
Microsoft worked with China's SMG TV News Center for four months to help develop XiaoIce for its new gig as a weather reporter:
"First of all, the technological breakthrough in artificial intelligent Text-to-Speech (TTS) has helped Xiaoice to score 4.32 points in linguistic naturalness, which is the closest to human voice compared to other artificial intelligent audio offerings (human's voice has scored 4.76, with full points being 5); secondly, based on the artificial intelligent technologies of Smart Cloud and Big Data, Xiaoice will enable deep learning in weather forecast and structuralize weather big data and meanwhile interact with live scenes to complete the broadcasting; thirdly, 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 has expanded the use of the XiaoIce chatbot to Japan and its says it will introduce it to other parts of the world, including the U.S., in the future.
