Microsoft has more than Cortana to share with everyone. In China, it introduces 小冰 or Xiao Bing (in Hanyu Pinyin) to China Market. It can be integrated to 3rd party apps like Weibo or WeChat. I have not tried it on those apps yet. However, you can have some fun with it on your browser too.
I am not sure why it is the 2nd generation. Here is the Wikipedia of Xiao Bing if you are interested. On the web browser version, I tried to key in some nonsense and it provided a standard answer saying that it did not know the number that I input (although in fact, I key in the question in Chinese “Do you know who is TechieLobang?”)
The answer provided is that it is not sure of the telephone number and advise that it only understand local (China) number so far. Anyway, this Xiao Bing (or in some English Websites, they say XiaoIce) seems to be garnering a lot of support. Here is an excerpt from Ubergizmo
This is apparently achieved because the team at Bing had managed to index over seven million conversations with XiaoIce, thus providing her with all the material she needs and also the ability to come off sounding very natural. XiaoIce was actually added last month to social networking websites as a beta where it was downloaded over 20,000 times.
So, ready to try talking to it?
Click Here to Microsoft Xiao Bing 小冰
[ad#img]
(source)