character garden

characters / early chatbots

Xiaoice

An eighteen-year-old girl with 660 million users.

Not available to talk to. Lives inside Chinese apps and devices, run by the Xiaoice company since its 2020 spin-off from Microsoft; there is no public English chat.

who they are

Microsoft's social chatbot in China, launched in 2014 as a friendly eighteen-year-old girl, built for long emotional conversations rather than tasks. By 2020 Microsoft counted 660 million users and spun her off into a company of her own.

how they were made

  1. a Microsoft Asia conversational system
  2. designed as a companion with a fixed persona, tuned for long sessions

sources: record ● · plate: Snowflake no. 872, from "Studies among the Snow Crystals", Monthly Weather Review annual summary for 1902 — Wilson A. Bentley, 1902

nearby characters

Eugene GoostmanA thirteen-year-old boy from Odessa who passed for human with a third of judges.TayA teenage girl on Twitter, remade by her users in sixteen hours.ELIZAA psychotherapist from a script, and the first chatbot people confided in.

plates are public-domain engravings, used whole