Microsoft’s artificial intelligent chatbot, Xiaoice, aka Little Bing, has recently been delivering the weather on the Chinese TV program ‘Morning News’. Previously employed as a personal assistant on messaging services such as WeChat, Weibo and Line, Xiaoice started as a trainee at the news center earlier this week.

Using big data and smart cloud technology Microsoft says Xiaoice is a frontier technology that at some point will feature in other countries around the world, starting with Japan and later reaching the USA. Announcing Xiaoice Microsoft said, “This is a vital breakthrough in the history of scientific technology and television, which also makes ‘Morning News’ the first live TV program around the world that has been integrated with the cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.”

Microsoft went on to say that Xiaoice scores 4.32 points in linguistic naturalness, higher than any other artificial intelligent audio technology to date. Humans, apparently, on average score 4.76, with 5 being the maximum. “Based on the artificial intelligent technologies of Smart Cloud and Big Data, Xiaoice will enable deep learning in weather forecast and structuralize weather big data and meanwhile interact with live scenes to complete the broadcasting,” says Microsoft,  while through Microsoft’s emotional computing technologies Xiaoice will also be able to give instant comments based on weather forecast data with, “her unique artificial intelligent style of emotional comments, featuring balanced levels in terms of IQ and EQ.”

The new anchor won’t be taking the job from other anchors at the moment, and will only provide more data when needed, according to reports.

Photo credit: James Jin via Flickr