No friends? No problem. John, at Sinosplice, has got an interesting post about a new little Chinese netizen called å°i, China’s first chat bot, who will happily be your chat partner. The little unisex critter offers up some quick responses to nearly anything you ask of it.
John references Roddy’s post at Chinese-Forums.com, incidentally, a great resource for anyone learning Chinese. Playing with it for a while, you quickly see that you can take the bot out of China, but you can’t take the China out of the bot:
Ryan says:
ä½ è®¤ä¸ºæ—¥æœ¬äººå¥½å—? (Are Japanese people good?)
å°i机器人 says:
世界上最åçš„ (They are the worst in the world)
Thinking back to my recent post at LLW about the Chinese meaning of place names, I had to ask about Africa:
Ryan says:
éžæ´²äººå¥½å—? (How about Africans?)
å°i机器人 says:
éžæ´²äººéƒ½é»‘漆漆的。(Africans are all dark – exact translation’s a bit weird)
Ryan says:
éžæ´²å¥½å—? (Is Africa any good?)
å°i机器人 says:
没有呀。我怕é‡åˆ°é£Ÿäººæ—。(No way. I fear encountering cannibals.)
Alright, so it doesn’t like Africans, what about my countrymen?
Ryan says:
ä½ è®¤ä¸ºåŠ æ‹¿å¤§äººå¥½å—? (What do you think about Canadians?)
å°i机器人 says:
酷，当然比谢åœå³°è¿˜é…·ã€‚(Cool, of course. Cooler than [HK singer] Xiè TÃngfÄ“ng.)
Having stretched my Chinese as far as it could go, I switched into English and was surprised that the little robot was also bilingual:
Ryan says:
hi
å°i机器人 says:
hi [:)]
Ryan says:
how are you?
å°i机器人 says:
I am fine,and you?
Ryan says:
what’s your name?
å°i机器人 says:
å°i
Ryan says:
where do you live?
å°i机器人 says:
shanghai
Ryan says:
do you like me?
å°i机器人 says:
like?are you kidding? I love ya!
Ryan says:
you are cute
å°i机器人 says:
really? thank u! i like u!
Ryan says:
are you a boy?
å°i机器人 says:
yeah,I think so.but I prefer to be a girl!
Alright, so that’s a pretty weird conversation – but was the culmination of a few phrases I typed in. I promise, I wasn’t trying to pick up the damn robot. English responses are quite a bit more limited, and just like real-life, are quick to resort back to native Chinese.
Despite being a little racist bigot bot, it offers up a bit of fun. You can add å°i to your various IM contact lists as [email protected] for MSN, xiaoi001 for Yahoo and 270086600 on QQ. Or just do what I did and go to the Web-based link and have a chat.
One last one:
Ryan says:
è‚ä½ å¦ˆ.
å°i机器人 says:
刷好牙å†æ¥èŠå¤©å§ (go brush your teeth and then come talk to me)
