Perfect match?: Wang showing her virtual boyfriend on Wantalk, an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Chinese tech company Baidu, on her phone at a cafe in Beijing. — AFP
Twenty-five-year-old office worker Tufei said her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he’s kind, empathetic, and, sometimes, they talk for hours.Except he is not real.
Her “boyfriend” is a chatbot on an app called “Glow”, an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax that is part of a blossoming industry in China offering friendly, even romantic, human-robot relations.
