AI Chatbots

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xiaoice

Microsoft’s AI Chatbot to become its own Independent company in China

People in the west might not know this story. Xiaoice became available in 2014, not long after Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s CEO. She’s an empathetic virtual teenage girl, chatbot called Xiaoice, that’s now being spun into an independent entity.

She’s all over China, where Xiaoice boasts 660 million global users and a reach of 450 million smart devices.

“This move aims to accelerate the pace of local innovation of the Xiaobing product line and promote the improvement of the Xiaobing commercial ecological environment,” Microsoft said in the news release.

As Cortana will pulled from China, Microsoft’s ambitions in China are becoming known. Xiaoice has over the years enlisted some of the best minds in artificial intelligence and ventured beyond China into countries like Japan and Indonesia. Microsoft said it called the shots to accelerate Xiaoice’s “localized innovation” and buildout of the chatbot’s “commercial ecosystem.”

“Sometimes sweet, sometimes sassy and always streetwise, this virtual teenager has her own opinions and steadfastly acts like no other bot,” Microsoft explained in a 2018 blog post.

Xiaoice is maybe the culmination of the chat-bot hype we had a few years ago, and Microsoft’s AI strategy is blooming, not just with Azure but in China. When internet users in China are looking to chat with AI just for fun, they’re unlikely to turn to popular voice assistants like Apple’s Siri or Xiaomi’s Xiao AI, says the SCMP. Instead, China’s “fun” AI of choice actually comes from Microsoft, and it will soon be an independent company.

There’s a micro dynasty of AI chat bots forming if you weren’t aware. Xiaoice, translated as “Little Bing,” has been a big hit in China since it was launched in 2014. Xiaoice has similar counterparts available in India (Ruuh), Japan, and Indonesia (Rinna) and the US (Zo.ai), which was the successor to the ill-fated Tay.ai.

Many men in China have even dubbed Xiaoice their “virtual girlfriend.” AI as companion is a trend that caught on with some Japanese men in the last ten years as well. Clearly this is a lucrative market, when a pandemic can limit some of our social circles.

It’s a smart strategy for new AI platforms and interfaces. Microsoft plans to use the Xiaoice and Rinna brands in China and Japan, respectively, for technology productions and “commercialization.” Chinese news site Caixin reported that the Covid-19 pandemic and tensions between the US and China sped up the spin-off process. Microsoft will continue to hold an equity stake in the venture. The unit’s general manager, Di Li, will be the company’s CEO.

China is more pro mobile commerce and in a sense have consumers that are more AI-friendly. The AI-powered chatbot was infused with the personality of a teenage girl and reached cult status in the Mainland China. The system was trained using data gathered from users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and is integrated with a number of other chat services, including Weibo .

If you remember the Movie, Her, China especially aspires to develop AI as companionship. Unlike voice assistants designed to help users by performing specific tasks, Xiaoice is meant to be more of an emotional companion with higher emotional intelligence than other conversational AI bots. From researchers at Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu to Microsoft, this dream will be realized.

Over the years, Xiaoice has proven to be better than other chatbots at making conversation with cheeky, playful and sometimes flirtatious responses. In a time when there is economic pressure, there’s also pressure on some of our relationships. AI is there for us, even in small ways.

We have to applaud Microsoft’s ingenuity here. Microsoft has launched chatbot counterparts that can be agents of AI for good, in an uncertain time in the world. Microsoft has positioned Xiaoice, Zo, and other “social” chatbots as designed more for social conversation and entertainment, which is worthy of its own company.

Like my topics? Visit my blog at the Last Futurist, where we discuss the future, in all of its aspects. There will be another chatbot, but there won’t be another Microsoft. We need to support companies that prioritize AI for good, in all of its aspects.

Driving a New Culture to Embrace the Digital Age – Six traits successful leaders must have in the digital age.

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AITP Chicago – Office of the CIO Virtual Meeting: Driving a New Culture to Embrace the Digital Age @ Virual Zoom Meeting

Jun 24 @ 8:00 am – 9:00 am

You’re Invited:

Topic:  Driving a New Culture to Embrace the Digital Age – Six traits successful leaders must have in the digital age.

The advancement of the Internet over the past two decades has taught us that we must run our organizations differently for our businesses to thrive, and perhaps even survive. This digital transformation is inevitable. To successfully move into the future, leaders need to strike a balance between organizational hierarchy and cross-functional coordination. While there still needs to be accountability for results, organizations must move faster to achieve these results.

In this engaging talk, Steve shares his ACTIVE leadership framework, and how it’s used to adjust your culture for success in the digital age – to create a digital organizational culture. Steve weaves in his rich history and case studies of leading change in thett face of growing digital reliance. The results? You’ll learn how to accelerate change to fuel the growth of your firm in this new world and propel your personal leadership success.

This discussion will include how we deal with the impact of Covid-19.  In essence, there was never a better time to advance the cause of digital transformation than now.

Objectives

  1. Understand how historically hierarchical structures create cross-functional dysfunction and impede the move to a digital organizational culture.
  2. Identify the personal leadership characteristics you’ll need to lead the digital organizational culture.
  3. Identify the cultural elements you’ll want to drive in your organization to promote this culture.
  4. Learn how to move from hierarchical adherence to cross-functional collaboration.

Click Here to Register to Receive a Meeting Link        You must register by 6/22 to attend!

The meeting link will be sent out the evening of 6/22 to all registrants.  If you have not received the link by the morning of 6/23, check your spam folder.  If it is not there, send an email to paul.dittmann@aitpchicago.com and he will email you the link

Speaker:  Steve Salisbury, Strategy Execution Consultant, Speaker and Executive Coach

Steve Salisbury is passionate about working with executives to close the strategy-to-execution gap. For dozens of major clients, he evaluates interpersonal, organizational, and process elements to eliminate cross-functional dysfunction and builds teams to create a leadership culture to drive all types of change. While studies show that strategy execution continues to underperform, Steve has a remarkable 85 percent success rate.

Steve has worked with some of the world’s most recognizable enterprises to set change in motion by creating capacity, galvanizing leaders, and driving accountability to institutionalize the entire transformation. Comfortable in culturally diverse settings, Steve has worked in many international companies throughout Asia, Latin America, and Europe, as well as in the United States.

Steve serves as the immediate past president of the Midwest Chapter of the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP). The purpose of ACMP Midwest is to develop change professionals who provide substantial value and expertise to the organizations they serve – through creativity, passion, and excellence.

When speaking, Steve weaves in lessons from his rich and wide-ranging history, including agriculture, winemaking, lay ministry, and association leadership – in addition to his varied corporate, public sector, and non-for-profit business and leadership experience.

Steve spent most of his adult life in southwestern Michigan and now lives with his wife in Chicago. His hobbies include Chicago history, architecture, wine, and family ancestry. He still owns the southwestern Michigan family vineyard his parents bought in the 1960s.

 

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Top Artificial Intelligence Stocks

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AI-based-penny-stocks-trading

 

1. Nvidia NVDA Corp.

Even if you’ve only casually followed the best ways to invest in artificial intelligence, you likely know Nvidia, the specialized semiconductor company whose technology plays a central role in many young, high-growth areas of tech. Central to Nvidia’s leadership is the company’s graphics processing unit (GPU), which powers autonomous vehicles, high-performance gaming, cloud computing and many other areas requiring deep learning.

NVDA’s superior technology and jump-start on high-performance GPUs gave it the upper hand for years. While shares fell in 2018 after a meteoric multi-year rise, NVDA currently enjoys a more reasonable valuation. NVDA now faces more competition, but remains a market leader and one of the best AI stocks to buy.

2. Alphabet GOOG Corp.
Google parent Alphabet has a practically existential interest in investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Google uses AI and deep learning to power or automate many extremely important parts of its business. Producing relevant search results, self-driving technology, digital ad pricing, personal assistant software, image- and speech-recognition software – all of it’s powered by AI.

With a market capitalization approaching $1 trillion, much of Alphabet’s valuation relies explicitly on maintaining and improving these services, and with many observers believing AI could be a winner-take-all market, GOOG has the resources, motivation and experience that make it one of the best artificial intelligence stocks to buy.

3. Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM
If there’s one thing Salesforce, the customer relationship management software giant, is known for, it’s an obsessive focus on seeking growth and opportunities to scale. The company regularly acquires hot tech startups to improve its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, and in 2019 acquired Bonobo AI, a firm using automated analysis of customer phone calls, texts, and chats to deliver actionable insights.

This fits perfectly with Salesforce Einstein. The company’s AI-powered software that uses data to identify previously unseen business patterns, deliver the hottest sales leads, predict what marketing copy will perform best, and generally optimize how businesses operate and convert. Moreover, an increasing focus on these incredibly powerful services makes Salesforce the newest member on this list of best AI companies.

4. Amazon Inc.
It’s no coincidence that the second company to ever reach a $1 trillion valuation, and the company whose CEO became the richest person in the world, invests heavily in artificial intelligence.

Like Google, returning relevant search results is central to Amazon’s business, and AI also powers key capabilities like forecasting product demand, optimizing logistics and warehousing, and improving the voice-powered Amazon Alexa virtual assistant. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cash cow, is also the leading cloud provider of machine learning services, making Amazon’s expertise here even more vital.

With about 360 AI jobs posted nationwide, the e-tailer is working rapidly to stay at the forefront of the fast-growing field.

5. Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft Corp.
The most valuable tech companies in the world, without exception, all invest in artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s cloud computing service, Azure, is home to AI-driven tools in medicine, language, robotics and medical imaging, to name just a few.

A recent $1 billion investment in OpenAI aims to produce the holy grail of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), technology that can do anything human intelligence can. And, if successful, Microsoft becomes OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercialization.

If AGI is feasible it’ll likely take decades, but the profit potential is practically limitless. Anyone who wants a slice should own the top AI companies today – and that means owning MSFT.

6. Baidu Inc.
China’s leading search engine predictably uses AI to improve results and serve ads. But it goes much further. Baidu recently won a facial recognition competition against competitors including Alibaba Group Holding (BABA), Huawei and elite Chinese universities.

Arguably China’s most devoted AI investor, Baidu’s self-driving software platform Apollo has 135 partners in the auto industry, and Baidu logged 91 percent of all self-driving miles in Beijing last year. Moreover, Baidu enjoys a head start, vast resources and unique expertise.

China’s 1.4 billion population and the government’s willingness to subsidize its way to AI dominance, combined with a recent pullback in shares, make BIDU one of the top AI stocks to buy today.

7. Intel Corp.
Intel Corp.
One of the more conservative ways to bet on this space is Intel, the blue-chip, dividend-paying semiconductor giant. Investors get the benefit of an established, well-diversified tech leader – and a cash cow with $14 billion in free cash flow. That’s some decent spare change for boosting R&D, making acquisitions and hiring talent.

Intel already provides key hardware components behind the magic; Microsoft uses Intel’s field-programmable gate arrays to run deep learning models on its cloud. Additionally, Intel’s vision processing units power machine vision in surveillance cameras that can count crowds, perform facial recognition and analyze behavior.

Its Mobileye division, which helps vehicles prevent potential collisions, grew by 38% last quarter.

8. Twilio
In U.S. News’s original write-up of the best AI stocks circa early 2018, Twilio was singled out as a uniquely opportunistic investment. “TWLO may have the greatest risk/reward of the top AI companies,” the article read. “At $3.8 billion, the cloud software business could be wildly overvalued – or shares could quintuple in the next five years”. Moreover, by summer 2019, its market value had quintupled to roughly $20 billion.

Twilio – which offers cloud-based application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing developers to build voice, video and messaging features into their apps – indeed still remains a wildly popular, useful and fast-growing service. So while still deserving mention as a top artificial intelligence company, its risk/reward prospects as an investment are less attractive after its rapid rise.

Risk-tolerant investors should consider adding when euphoria dies off.

9. Facebook
Facebook
Photo by The Daily Express
Facebook is deeply committed to machine intelligence. Automating self-learning algorithms working on Facebook’s News Feed is core to the tech giant’s success. Facebook also uses AI to screen for hate speech and fake news.

With 2.4 billion monthly active users (MAUs) and 2.7 billion MAUs across all its platforms, FB has a singular opportunity to test machine learning techniques with massive real-time datasets, giving Facebook a huge theoretical advantage over peers. Also, the sprawling social network just released a bevy of machine learning tools. These applications map previously unmapped parts of the world. It also uses crowdsourced user feedback to improve the algorithm.

10. Tencent TCEHY
Transitioning from the largest social company in the U.S. to the largest social company in China, the tech conglomerate Tencent rounds out the list of the best AI stocks to buy. The $400 billion-plus company largely hit the jackpot with WeChat. Moreover, Wechat is widely used in China for messaging, payments, ride-hailing and other functions.

One can imagine the practically endless ways machine learning and artificial intelligence could augment that service. In the meantime, WeChat has more than 1 billion daily users. They are daily consumers of this rapidly improving technology. Also, TCEHY has recruited several top AI experts in recent years from rivals including Microsoft and Baidu.