Computer Programmer Develops Chatbot to Reply to Girlfriend’s Texts

Image credit: Li Kaixiang via Oddity Central

There are times when you just have too much on your plate that you are unable to attend to other people’s needs but you wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings by seemingly ignoring them. That’s why Li Kaixiang, a software developer in China, decided to create an instant messaging bot which would reply automatically to all of his girlfriend’s text messages. And apparently, it worked.

He even posted some screenshots of the chatbot’s conversation with his girlfriend on WeChat, and it definitely looks like the software did pretty good. He also mentioned that on the first day that the chatbot went online, it exchanged around 300 texts with his girlfriend, which kind of explains why he created it in the first place.

After he posted it on social media, it immediately blew up and went viral. Some praised his ingenuity while others criticized him for supposedly being “too busy” but still having the time to create the bot. To be fair, he is a software developer so that should be a cinch for him. Though arguments for simply replying to his girlfriend’s texts himself are also valid since he should most likely be able to come with up with sufficient replies. But it is also possible that the nature of his work or company culture prevents him from doing anything not related to work.

In any case, he showed the actual program to his girlfriend after she started to suspect how he was able to reply so quickly and it appears that she wasn’t too upset about it. There was a point though when she began to think something was odd about his replies. The bot isn’t far from perfect. Apart from responding almost immediately, which the bot was smart enough to dodge, one of the bot’s other replies included a weather update.

…in another conversation, it wrote “Baby, this is the 618th day we’ve been together. Wish your mood is brighter than the sun,” which is sweet, only it was followed by information about the weather (“Temperature: 18.0° – 34.0° C… Wind: Level 3… Air quality: 42.0”) which it probably scraped from somewhere.

Despite its glitches, a lot of people still thought that the program was very useful and they were asking for the source code. However, just after the post received so much attention, Li took down his account. He probably didn’t want the attention or he just wanted to keep the code to himself.

By Jeremiah