BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A pair of'chatbots' in China have been taken offline after appearing to stray off-script. In response to users' questions, one said its dream was to travel to the United States, while the other said it wasn't a huge fan of the Chinese Communist Party. The two chatbots, BabyQ and XiaoBing, are designed to use machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out conversations with humans online. Both had been installed onto Tencent Holdings Ltd's popular messaging service QQ. The indiscretions are similar to ones suffered by Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, where chatbots used expletives and even created their own language.

One of China's most popular smartphone assistants, HTC's Hidi, has ambitions to serve as the voice and personality of countless home robots. The company behind Hidi, Turing Robot, supplies voice recognition and natural-language processing technology for a growing array of hardware, including car systems developed by Bosch and home appliances from Haier. Now the company has developed an operating system for service robots. So far, Turing Robot provides the voice--and brains--for several popular Chinese home entertainment robots. Supplying the intelligence for home robots could be a shrewd move.