A Chinese computer programmer has managed to make quite an impact on the social media after posting that he had developed a custom chatbot that answered to his girlfriend’s texts 24/7. Li Kaixiang has said that he did so because he was too busy to reply to the texts on his own.
Li Kaixiang works as a software development engineer for the Chinese Internet company JD.com. He admits that he was often too caught up in work to answer his girlfriend’s daily texts but also didn’t want to hurt her feelings. His solution was to create a custom chatbot that would answer to his girlfriend’s messages and send messages on his behalf. He posted some of the screenshots on Weibo, and it does appear that the chatbot was doing a good enough job. According to Li Kaixiang, on the first day that the chatbot went online, it exchanged about 300 texts with his girlfriend – explains why he created the chatbot in the first place.
There has been no mention of whether the girlfriend was aware of the fact that the messages were being replied to automatically. However, people have loved the idea, and some have even asked for the source code. One Weibo user wrote, ‘It is such a good idea. I wouldn’t have to worry about irritating my girlfriend by not responding to her messages.’ Another user said, ‘Brother, send me the source code please.’
Not everyone was quick to jump on the bandwagon though, and many criticized Li for claiming to be too busy to reply to his girlfriend’s texts while he had the time to come up with a custom chatbot. Others have warned him that the partner might fall in love with the chatbot by commenting, ‘Be careful, your girlfriend might fall in love with the chatbot one day.’
Nonetheless, what is for sure is the fact that his post instantly went viral on Chinese social media. However, he didn’t really like the attention and soon deleted his Weibo account after the post went viral.
