Chatbot Economy in China: Microsoft and Turing Robot Lead the Way
BEIJING, July 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- It seems that since the moment Mark Zuckerberg got on stage at F8 in 2016 and announced the Messenger chatbot ecosystem, chatbot jumped in the middle of the stage of new technologies.Countless newcomers, including innovative brands, agencies, and developers start to test their own chatbot products. 30,000 bots were launched within six months and thousands more surfaced each month afterward on Facebook and other platforms.
As showed in a recent study of the most common languages Facebook bots are based on, besides English which ranks the first, bots in Chinese seem to amount to less than expected. This, to some point reflects the bots economy in China, which is not as prosperous as that in America or European countries. Even though there are several Chinese companies providing chatbot related services, few of them are as famous as Facebook's M or Microsoft's Cortana.
Although there's a gap between the development stage of chatbot in and out of China, the important role social platforms play is the same. Early this year, Tencent enrolled two kinds of chatbots in QQ groups. Owners of the group can choose to use either one of them in his/her group, to help with the management and increasing the atmosphere of the virtual community. These two chatbots are from Microsoft and Turing Robot.
Like its English voice assistant Cortana, Microsoft launched its Chinese based chatbot "XiaoBing" in 2014. It was positioned as a person for social purposes. The character is quite clear: lively, open and sometimes a little mean. Hence chatting with them can be fun, not only the techniques they demonstrate. Till now, XiaoBing has developed dozens of techniques to play with human users and made a big hit in Chinese social networks like Weibo, Wechat and multiple other platforms.
What makes Turing Robot's BabyQ different with XiaoBing is its advantage in functional usage, such as weather forecasts, FAQ, encyclopedia and other useful capabilities. Even though not as characteristic as XiaoBing, BabyQ can also play games with group members to make the chatting experience better. Another vital difference between the two is their degree of openness, Turing Robot is open but XiaoBing is not. This means a lot to partners and developers, as an open chatbot is much easier to settle into their own products and business. It could be argued that is why Turing Robot has accumulated up to 600,000 developers, even more than that of Facebook.
Chatbots are rocking the economy around the world, changing the face of the industry, delivering information faster and more efficiently than humans ever could. China can not be an exception. With more companies like Tencent taking bots into its mature products system for innovation, there will be more Chinese based chatbots like XiaoBing and BabyQ come into the sight of public, making notable changes to the fast growing economy and society of China.
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SOURCE Turing Robot
