AI employees 'reliable, stable and indefatigable'

Employees at Chinese real estate developer Vanke were surprised to find that they had a special contender for the award of the company's best new employee in 2021.

The special contender was Cui Xiaopan, in charge of reminding employees to pay the company's bills on time and collect bills due. The resolution rate of the cases Cui handled was as high as 91.44 percent, and the new employee was ultimately awarded the prize.

Cui is the first digital employee at Vanke, and the human appearance of Cui and the fact that "she" emails employees are believed to have contributed to a higher resolution rate than their simply receiving an impersonal automatic reminder.

Yu Liang, chairman of Vanke, said Cui joined the company in February 2021.Thanks to the support of powerful artificial intelligence algorithms, "she" quickly learned how to find problems in processes and data and detect abnormal documents far more efficiently than human employees.

Cui's virtual image was rendered by the neural network technologies developed by Chinese AI pioneer Xiaoice. These technologies are a method of attempting to reproduce the workings of the human brain by having a computer learn from experience.

With rapid technological advancements, digital beings are becoming increasingly popular in China. AI beings developed by Xiaoice are now available in a string of sectors, functioning as hosts on news programs and as singers, painters or designers.

Li Di, CEO of Xiaoice, said, "With joint efforts with our partners, an era has arrived in which AI beings are becoming reliable, stable and indefatigable."

AI beings developed by Xiaoice now work as two video hosts for China's National Business Daily. They have been broadcasting news for about three months.

Xiaoice said the two virtual hosts have made breakthroughs in two aspects. First, the virtual hosts' overall naturalness has been improved to a level that they are almost indistinguishable from humans. Also, the news programs are developed entirely by AI technologies in an unmanned operation encompassing the entire process of video acquisition, editing and broadcasting.

Xiaoice said in terms of commercial value, it has also managed to reduce production costs to enable the large-scale application of virtual hosts and to promote the industrialization and commercialization of virtual humans.

The company said after collecting and processing video data about a human anchor, Xiaoice's AI models can train a relatively high-quality digital twin in about a week.

The moves are part of a broader push by Xiaoice to be a platform to power new generation, AI-enabled human-machine interactions. Last year, Xiaoice also launched an app that allows users to create their own AI friends and interact with virtual characters in immersive experiences. The app, named Xiaoice Island, integrates Xiaoice's abilities to let AI systems compose and sing songs, draw paintings and edit videos, Li said.

Xiaoice's AI systems have already helped to comfort lonely hearts through more than 17 million virtual "girlfriends "and "boyfriends" in China. These 17 million electronic love interests have also moved to the Xiaoice Island app.

Xiaoice, which started as a chat robot in 2014, said in November that the company of the same name provides voice-activated virtual assistants in more than 1 billion individual smart hardware devices, including smartphones and smart speakers, through its partnerships with Xiaomi Corp, Oppo, Vivo and other companies. It has also reached cooperative agreements with automaker BMW and electric carmaker NIO.

Such broader interactions with humans enable Xiaoice to have a large quantity of data to constantly upgrade its abilities, according to the company.

Chinese consumers have become more familiar with AI beings. The trend has come as AI is seeing wider commercialization across many sectors.

China will become a major mover in global AI development and contribute 15.6 percent of the global market by 2024, according to a report jointly released by global market research firm International Data Corp and cloud computing and big data supplier Inspur Group.