Li Zhou, Jianfeng Gao, Di Li, Heung-Yeung Shum
2018 · arXiv
This paper describes the development of Microsoft XiaoIce, the most popular social chatbot in the world. XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an AI companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) in system design, cast human-machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since her launch in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of large scale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations.
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Tay was presumably the English version of XiaoIce, which apparently has its own paper[1]. It states that they combined a Markov decision process to select between conversation modes, a retrieval-based response generator for curated answers and a GRU-RNN[2] response generator for free-form ones. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08989.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_recurrent_unit
What I find interesting is that Microsoft is trying to turn Bing Chat into an emotionless customer service persona, while Microsoft China is for years operating XiaoIce (alternative translation: Little Bing), with a persona they describe as "a 18-year-old girl who is always reliable, sympathetic, affectionate, and has a wonderful sense of humor", with a design principle that among other things includes "to meet users’ emotional needs, such as emotional affection and social belonging" [1]. What is driving this huge difference? Is it cultural differences? The different target demographic? The media backlash they get whenever Bing Chat does something interesting? Being more risk averse because this is "proper Microsoft" not just "something in China"? 1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08989.pdf (paper also contains lots of example conversations with translation)
I was curious on how the chatbot actually works, so I found an arXiv paper about it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 (The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot)
From my understanding that is exactly what Microsoft's XiaoIce is doing in the Chinese market. Just with a text interface instead of a voice interface. I guess there's not much interest to develop something equivalent for the English-speaking market because it's difficult to monetize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoice https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08989.pdf (actually a better introduction than the wikipedia)
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