XiaoIce Is Cortana’s ‘Little Sister’

Everyone would have been aware of Microsoft’s Cortana, which is a personal digital assistant that has certainly managed to cause some ripples when it correctly predicted the outcome of the matches in this summer’s World Cup, and here we are with what Microsoft calls XiaoIce, where some have deemed it to be Cortana’s little sister. Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana, when released in China, is given the nickname “Xiao Na”, and hence, the Bing team decided to come up with XiaoIce with the intention of harnessing Bing’s knowledge repository so that it can better understand the billions of people, places and things out there in the real world.

XiaoIce, which is literally translated to “little ice”, is more of a social assistant that users are able to add as a friend on several major Chinese social networking services, where among them include Weibo’s some 700 plus million users and Touchpal. XiaoIce happens to be a sophisticated conversationalist with a distinct personality, where she is able to chime into a conversation using context-specific facts at her disposal. Sentiment analysis also allows her to adapt her phrasing and responses that will be based on positive or negative cues from her human counterparts. [Press Release]