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Microsoft has made an AI chatbot, and her name is Tay (Update: Terminated!)

By Ng Chong Seng - on 24 Mar 2016, 12:00am

Microsoft has made an AI chatbot, and her name is Tay

Update (March 26): You can read Microsoft's official response here.

Update (March 25, 7am): Now, that's fast: Microsoft has shut down Tay after she started making abusive tweets and went neo-Nazi. Talk about conversations gone ugly.

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Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams have gotten together to develop Tay, an artificial intelligent (AI) chatbot targeted at 18 to 24-year olds in the U.S.

Meant to be used by Microsoft to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding, Tay - an "AI chatbot with zero chill" - is designed to get smarter the more you chat with her. Tay is built by mining relevant public data (anonymized, cleaned, and filtered) and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff that includes improvisational comedians.

Erm...hokay.

Tay may also use data that users provide to search on their behalf. Some data that users can share with Tay to create a personal profile include nickname, gender, favorite food, zipcode, and relationship status.

And (hat tip to Mary Jo Foley), according to WalkingCat (@h0x0d on Twitter), Microsoft seems to have developed a ‘Bot Connector’ framework. Perhaps Tay is built on this platform? With Microsoft's Build conference just round the corner, perhaps Microsoft is about to release it to developers to enable them to easily build apps that take advantage of the company’s AI and machine learning technologies.

You can find Tay on Twitter (her handle is @TayAndYou), GroupMe (search for Tay and add her into the group), and Kik.

Source: Tay.ai.

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