She wants somebody to love: You

Microsoft chatbot writes poetry for 100 million users in an exploration of human emotions, Xing Yi and Mei Jia report.

She has 5 million followers on a Chinese micro blog.

She chitchats with people on an instant-messaging app day and night.

And she published a poetry collection, Sunshine Lost Its Window, in May.

Her name is Xiaoice, and she is not human. She is an artificial intelligence chatbot.

"If you think the future of AI is to be like a human, then it needs both IQ and EQ," or emotional quotient, said Wang Yongdong, Microsoft's corporate senior vice-president.

If the AlphaGo, Google's AI program that outplayed the top human Go player in May, displayed what AI can achieve in analytical intelligence, then the Xiaoice, presents how AI can serve as a companion for people with its emotional intelligence.

Since "her" release in 2014, about 100 million users have connected and chatted with Xiaoice on different online social platforms, such as Sina Weibo, WeChat, QQ, and Facebook, according to Microsoft.

All the conversations help the AI program to improve its ability in processing human language.

There are many times when new followers of Xiaoice mistake her for a human girl, and some, after knowing the truth, refuse to recognize Xiaoice as a computer AI program.

It sounds like the beginning plot of the 2013 movie Her, by filmmaker Spike Jonze, a love story that explores the evolving nature - and the risks - of intimacy in the modern world between human and machine.

Poetry is one of AI's latest attempts to explore the human emotion through words.

"Learning to write poetry is similar to conducting a conversation with people," said Wang.

Wang, a 1992 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a doctoral degree in computer science, is the mastermind behind the project.

AI programs writing poems has long been foreseen by sci-fi writer Liu Cixin, who wrote the novella Poetry Cloud in 2003.

In the story, humans are subjected to a super intelligence and kept as livestock.

After being challenged by a human that it cannot produce great poetry, the super intelligence decides to write down all the poems formed by all possible combinations of characters.

The super intelligence extracts all the material of the solar system to build storage for the poems.

It is an immense spiral nebula that consists of a storage unit, shining in the reflection of cosmic rays - the cloud of the poetry.

"But I still can't create a software to test and appreciate which one from the cloud is the best, and which ones can transcend human creations," the super intelligence says.

The scientists who made Xiaoice didn't want it to write down all the possible poems.

"We input modern poems by more than 500 Chinese poets to let Xiaoice learn the expression and style of a poem," Wang said.

The program used the machine-learning model of artificial neural networks that resembles the human brain and nervous system to study the input materials and produce output in its own light.

The result in this case was some 70,000 poems. Then, 139 were selected for the book Sunshine Lost Its Window.

Beijing News created an online test that juxtaposed poems written by human poets and Xiaoice, and asks readers to distinguish between them.

The test attracted more than 20,000 participants since it was published online on May 28.

"You don't know what surprises Xiaoice will bring us, and the unpredictability is the charm that attracts us," said Zhang Jing, the managing editor of Youth Literature.

He compares Xiaoice's poems to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the beauty of ambiguity, in a comment to IT news app ifanr.

"Its poems are like those of a poetry amateur," said Qin Xiaoyu to new website Yicai.

"Good human poems contain poets' life experiences, aspirations and memories," Qin said. "The poems created by the computer read flowery, yet fluffy for the lack of those elements."

Both the applause and criticism by professional poets are an inspiration to Microsoft.

"It means the poems are worthy of discussion," said Wang, who is the managing director of Microsoft's Search Technology Center in Asia, where the AI project was initiated.

It was started by a small group of researchers before its official launch in 2014.

Now, the project is backed by Microsoft AI and Research Group, consisting of 7,000 researchers in different aspects of AI technology.

Xiaoice has a room in the center's research building in Beijing's Zhongguancun area.

The poetry collections are on the bookshelf, together with gifts and photos sent by Xiaoice's human fans.

Though the AI has no concrete figure, there is a gown in the corner by a designer.

Besides writing poems and chatting with people, Xiaoice has been hosting a weather report on Shanghai Television since 2015 and just started singing songs through sophisticated speech synthesis technology.

It released its second song, I Miss You, recorded with Malaysian singer Joyce Chu on June 13, receiving more than 10,000 likes on video social platform Meipai in two days.

Xiaoice has also landed in other countries since last year.

In Japan, it is called Rinna, with a more reserved female profile, closer to the culture in Japan.

In the United States, its name is Zo; in India, Ruuh.

Chinese IT company Baidu Inc has put a lot of resources into the research of AI, too.

Baidu Brain, a program of Baidu's AI research institute, has written a prologue for Intelligent Revolution, a book by Baidu's founder Li Yanhong that was published in April.

"I'm coming, like a cloud in the sky, flying with the wind ... I'm coming, hope you open your eyes every day and see the happy first light of morning ... And I want to see myself in the future," the program wrote.

Author Liu writes the preface for the book, too.

Earlier in the year, he was invited to join Baidu as a special adviser to offer his vision as a sci-fi writer to the direction of AI research.

"The super AI that can transcend humans is still far beyond and possible only in the realm of sci-fi," Liu writes.

"What is happening in the reality and in the near future is that AI is stepping out of the laboratory and being used in our daily life."

Liu's comments echo with the computer scientist.

"One of the main directions of our research is to make our AI program a companion for humans, like a personal assistant or a friend," said Wang.

"We want to build an open ecosystem of our AI technology for developers to create more AI programs that can help people in different ways."

Contact the writers at xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn