Microsoft has created an artificially intelligent weather reporter

Providing us with further proof that nobody’s job is safe from the robot takeover, Microsoft has unveiled a new artificial intelligence that’ll be serving as a weather reporter for China’s Morning News, which is the first time a robot has taken that kind of position of that kind. Known as Xiaoice, the artificial intelligence sounds uncomfortably similar to a human, and even comes with “emotional computing” technologies that allows it to make human-like emotional comments. 

Xiaoice is Microsoft’s latest piece of artificial intelligence. She has a ‘cute’ voice, can instantly comment on weather data and big news events, and now, she has a job on morning TV. The Chinese live program, ‘Morning News,’ introduced the AI on Tuesday, making Xiaoice the first robot to take on a job of this kind. Her voice sounds more like a human’s than any other AI’s to date, and Xioice’s success now has people questioning the future of their careers. Morning News has added the robot software to their live broadcast line-up, and as a ‘trainee anchor,’ she will deliver the weather forecast every day. While Xiaoice is just making her Dragon TV debut, she gained previous popularity on interactive platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and JD.com. To achieve a 4.32 score in linguistic naturalness, compared to the 4.76 score of a human voice, developers equipped the AI with breakthrough Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology. Using deep learning techniques through Smart Cloud and Big Data, Xiaoice will be able to analyse weather data while giving a live broadcast.