This article originally appeared on ABACUS What does life insurance has to do with music? I’m not sure either -- but Chinese insurer Ping An thinks it will help its business. According to the South China Morning Post , the company says it has created an AI program that can compose original songs by studying piano music. Executives believe the right melodies will help increase brand loyalty among its 400 million clients, but they didn’t elaborate on how that might work. Training computers to create art is nothing new. A machine learning program written by a professor in the US released its first classical music album in 2009. And Google’s Magenta AI and Sony’s Flow Machines are both capable of writing tunes. Last year, singer Taryn Southern used AI to compose and produce an entire album called I AM AI. She claimed all she had to do was tell the computer the genre and instruments that she likes, and it would generate a song that she could then adjust manually. Ping An says eventually it wants its computers to sing and make bespoke pop music based on the tastes of individual customers. It’s also aiming to compose symphonies that rival those by Beethoven. The company claims it is making strides in other AI technologies as well. It says its customer service hotline uses a voice recognition system to assess how upset a caller is. And facial recognition is deployed to determine if a loan applicant is lying. For more insights into China tech, sign up for our tech newsletters , subscribe to our Inside China Tech podcast , and download the comprehensive 2019 China Internet Report . Also roam China Tech City , an award-winning interactive digital map at our sister site Abacus .
