I Have Decided to Go Look for My Father

Due to the lights, Gu Xi and her teammates still could not see outside of their area. Nevertheless, the audiences could see inside the control room clearly.

“Does this team only have three people or that only three of them were there right now?”

“Why do I feel that they are still just kids?”

“Right? They don’t look very old. They are so young for this competition.”

Looking at the three inside the control area, especially Gu Xi and Sheng Xiuyan, there were voices of surprises and discussions among the audiences.

Even though there had been many more minors signed up to the competition after the rule change, but many of them were just there to observe. Very few of them were actually contributing to the competition.

“They look to still be students. I wonder what their project is on and how they were able to make it through the last few rounds of selections.”

Some were strictly curious and others were skeptical about the whole thing.

***

Gu Xi and the others, through the special layer of soundproof glass, had no idea about that.

“Let’s get started then,” said Gu Yanlin as he started working on the control panel in the back.

Quickly, the screen in the middle of the stage lit up and, in the middle, a three-dimensional projection appeared: It was a sphere-shaped object that resembled a white mochi ball with a cute antenna on top of it.

It was the image of Xibao that Gu Xi had designed a while back.

After another round of testing, Gu Yanlin gave Gu Xi and Sheng Xiuyan an “okay” signal.

Gu Xi and Sheng Xiuyan nodded and started operations from the front end.

First of all, close captioning appeared on the bottom of the projection. It was an introduction to the concept and features of the Smart Companion System done in Xibao’s milky and a hint of mechanical voice.

After that, Gu Xi and Sheng Xiuyan started interacting with Xibao from the front end.

As it was not a finished product, all of the “interactions” were done in data format.

From the right side of the stage, the commands that Gu Xi and Sheng Xiuyan had entered would appear. Stuff such as asking her about the weather or expressing that they didn’t feel well, or wanted to listen to songs, or controlling switches.

After these commands were entered, Xibao would respond accordingly.

Everything was working smoothly.

Except that someone from the audiences raised a question.

“This ‘Smart Companion’ is just a Family Smart Robot, right?”

“Looks like it.” The person next to them nodded, then frowned. “So far it seemed it was running smoothly with a nice design, but I felt that it is very similar to a lot of products that are already on the market.”

“I agree. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t say it’s very creative.” What the person had said was right. If they were researching on something that already existed on the market, then they were not meeting the requirements of the competition.

***

The audiences under the stage were filled with doubts.

And, right when the audiences were discussing about it, XIbao’s voices and exterior color began to change. Some had also noticed that the way Xibao responded and the content and even the “tone” had altered slightly.

The change became more obvious as more and more commands were given to it.

For example, Xibao’s voice became loud and slow; the way it was turning off the light switches went from immediately to dimming slowly after 5 seconds; the frequency of classical old songs increased; and the font on the screen enlarged and became bolder.

And there was its response. It didn’t seem to differ to much from its original official response at first but, even with the same question, one would notice that Xibao started filtering out some of the useless advertisements embedded within and also some of the more scientific parts of the explanation. Its emphasized had shifted more toward high-blood pressure and some of its language and vocabulary had also been switched out.

“It felt somewhat different than before……” Someone mumbled.

But they weren’t able to exactly pinpoint what was the difference. If they must say: It seemed to be becoming more human-like?

“You are right!”

“Was it due to the commands being inputted?”

“Not really. The commands being inputted didn’t seem that different.”

“So it was a setting for specific users?”

“I get it! This smart system is adapting to the user’s identity and habits, etc.”

“That could be it.” Someone nodded, and added. “What I want to know is whether this was preset or spontaneous.”

If it was the latter, then it would make sense how this project had made it this far.