Microsoft "It's spreading its empathic chatbot Xiaoice to an independent entity," said the US software giant (in Chinese) on Monday, confirming a previous report from the Chinese news site Chuhaipost in June.
The announcement came several months after Microsoft announced that it would close its Cortana voice assistant app in China among other countries late last year.
Over the years Xiaoice has enrolled some of the best minds in artificial intelligence and has ventured beyond China into countries such as Japan and Indonesia. Microsoft said it had defined the blows to accelerate Xiaoice's "localized innovation" and the creation of the chatbot's "commercial ecosystem".
The spin-off will see Microsoft's new licensing technologies for subsequent research and development in Xiaoice and continue to use the Xiaoice brand (and Rinna in Japanese), while Microsoft will retain its stake in the new company.
In 2014, a small team of Microsoft researchers from Bing unveiled Xiaoice, which means "Little Bing" in Chinese. The bot immediately caused a stir in China and was considered by many to be their virtual girlfriend. The chatbot arrived a few weeks after Microsoft launched Cortana into the country. Modeled on the personality of a teenage girl, Xiaoice aims to add a more human and social element to chatbots. In the same words as Microsoft, she wants to be friends with a user.
Like all foreign companies, Microsoft faces Chinese censorship. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from Tencent's Instant Messenger QQ on suspicion of a politically sensitive speech.
The project involved some of the most prestigious AI scientists on earth, ranging from Lu Qi, who continued to join Baidu as chief operating officer and brought Y Combinator to China; Jing Kun, who has taken a seat in Baidu to direct the search giant's smart devices; and Harry Shum, a former executive of Microsoft's legendary Artificial Intelligence and Research unit, and now sits on the board of the fledgling News Break news app.
Shum will act as president of the new autonomous entity of Xiaoice. Li Di, general manager of Xiaoice, will act as CEO. Chen Zhan, a developer of the Japanese chatbot Rinna, is appointed general manager of the Japanese office.
The new company will retain the right to use the "Xiaoice" and "Rinna" brands, with the mission to further develop its customer base throughout the Greater China region, Japan and Indonesia.
Microsoft claimed that Xiaoice has a reach of 660 million users and 450 million third-party smart devices globally at the latest count. The chatbot found applications in sectors such as finance, retail, auto, real estate and fashion, where it said it could "extract the context, the hue and the emotions from the text to create unique models in seconds".
