Update | WeChat, Microsoft trade fire over 'killing' of chatbot amid privacy, foul language concerns

China’s popular mobile messaging application WeChat has extensively removed many artificially intelligent “chatbots” throughout its platform, just three days after Microsoft registered them as users as part of its testing phase for the project.

The chatbots, named Xiaobing a common nickname for young girls in Chinese, is the latest Microsoft product to tap into China’s growing smartphone and social media user base.

Similar to smartphone intelligent “personal assistants” like Apple iPhone’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortina, the bot can simulate conversations with WeChat users based on pre-stored data. It also has access to Microsoft’s search engine Bing to answer questions from users.

Microsoft released 100,000 of these bots on WeChat, which appear as individual user profiles with the same username and profile picture. WeChat users can follow and start conversation with a Xiaobing bot, which responds to text as well as audio.

However on Sunday, the mobile app owned by internet giant Tencent had deleted almost all of these chatbots, according to Microsoft.

“Within two hours, many chatbots’ accounts belonging to various chat groups were suddenly removed without prior notice,” said a statement issued by Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group on Sunday.