Microsoft's new robot answered our questions about Nicola Sturgeon, Lionel Messi and Oor Wullie

Microsoft has combined a number of its technologies to create a new bot called Murphy, which responds to “what if” questions with an image that visualises and answer.

You can chat with Murphy on Skype, Facebook Messenger, or a couple of other apps. The bot’s responses use Bing Image Search and other analytics software to find and merge photos for the answer to your question.

Murphy is brand new and is still learning, which means it may not answer immediately. You can give the bot feedback, however, using emoticons. See how he answered our questions:

oor wullie on mars

Or perhaps this one?

Or even:

If you keep telling the bot that you like the results (with a “:)” smiley) it will keep producing similar results:

It can also have some fairly disturbing results too:

Already famed for their similar hair, here’s Boris Johnson as Donald Trump:

If you are feeling at all sore about the Brexit result, there’s the prospect of this:

And for those of us with big imaginations:

And…

A cool feature of this bot is that you can upload a photo of yourself for use in your “what if” scenarios. Microsoft says Murphy stores uploaded photos for only 10 minutes, purely for chat purposes, before they are deleted.

I had a go:

As you can see, it can be a lot of fun.

Microsoft’s Project Murphy team wanted to create a bot with an imagination – merging machine learning and intelligence with human interaction.

Last year, the Microsoft team members came up with the HowOldRobot, at the firm’s Build Conference. More than 90 million people uploaded a picture to this bot, to have it guess their age.

To play with Murphy, visit this page: http://www.projectmurphy.net/

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