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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/14/microsoft_is_banking_on_bots/
Uh-oh! Microsoft has another chatbot – but racism is a no-go for Zo

Microsoft has been working on forging an emotional connection between people and bots for a while. The hugely successful Chinese chatbot, Xiaoice, was born from a hackathon, officially launched in 2014, and has 40 million users.

Xiaoice is modelled on the personality of a teenager. The social bot has gained something similar to celebrity status, and even has a “job” at Shanghai Dragon TV as a weather presenter. Spurred by Xiaoice’s success, Microsoft launched Rinna, a schoolgirl bot in Japan that has also accrued a large following.

When Microsoft built a social bot for the Western world, however, it didn’t go so smoothly. Tay, the chatbot that learned to communicate over Twitter, had to be shut down because it began to churn out racist and sexist messages after miscreants exploited a hidden debug backdoor to teach it outrageous new phrases. Now, Microsoft has returned with Zo, a less-potty-mouthed, sassy sister to Tay.

Zo was quietly piloted on Kik, a popular messaging app, since October, and was interacting with about 110,000 people. Less than a fifth of those people had talked to Zo for more than an hour in one sitting, Shum said.
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