Sophia- A Real, Live Electronic Girl. The world’s ever first most expressive humanoid robot with citizenship.
In the path of the tremendous development phase of the technology, the world’s ever first most expressive humanoid robot with citizenship in a country is created by Dr.David Hanson (CEO of Hanson Robotics) and his friends at Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong in 2015 named ‘Sophia’. Sophia, a real, live electronic girl. She is activated on April 19th, 2015. This development is considered as a grate breakthrough in the line of robotics and AI technologies. Humanoid robots are a category of robots which have a body structure that resembles the body of human. They do have a torso, head, arms, legs though some forms of humanoid robots possibly model only part of the body, for example, from the waist up. Sophia is the splendid creation among the humanoid robots in the history.
As another crucial fact, the robot Sophia has given the citizenship of Saudi Arabia on 25th of October 2017. Hence Sophia became a Saudi Arabian citizen, the first robot to obtain citizenship of any country.
The facial expressions, the intelligence, the thoughts of Sophia helps to stamped her as a marvellous humanoid robot in the world of Robotics. She can answer the questions with abundant intelligence, and even she tells jokes at some times and kidding the human interactors. Sophia’s skin is made up of ‘Frubber’, a material patented by Hanson Robotics. Frubber is known as the flesh rubber. In the robots of the Hanson Robotics, they use this Frubber to make the skin of the robots. This flesh rubber is a proprietary nanotech skin that imitates the real human musculature and skin. This aids the robots to express various qualified facial expressions and hence enhance the interactivity. Sophia can emulate more than 62 facial expressions as she is interacting with the people. The servomotors are used to produce facial expressions in Sophia. She can smile, frown, scowl, sneer, look happy, angry, afraid, surprised, disgusted, sad, confused, sleepy, neutral, and many others. The gestures expressed by Sophia include eyebrow motions, blinking, aesthetically realistic moving eyes, mouth and jaw motion, and head turn/neck motions. Sophia is able to process speech and have conversations using voice recognition system and tools given by the parent company of Google, Alphabet Inc. Sophia see through the cameras within her eyes combined with computer algorithms. She can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognize individuals. The arms with grasping capabilities given to Sophia only before some two three months before. But, even though Sophia has no legs till now. She is designed only waist-up, up to now. But, Sophia will soon have arms and legs that move, and it’ll be able to walk, said Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, the company that designed her artificially intelligent brain.
The brain power (intelligence) of Sophia has been developed by the SingularityNET team. The SingularityNET is known to be a protocol which can provide solution in AI today such as the complexity in communication, expensive, hard to use. SingularityNET solve these problems with AI while expanding the AI market to the entire world. SingularityNET allows AI-as-a-service on permission less platform, so that anyone can use AI services easily, without difficulty. This is happen in the Sophia robot circumstances. So that, any one can easily interact with Sophia. The SingularityNET team stated that “With SingularityNET, anyone could access Sophia’s mind on demand. Soon, Sophia’s entire mind will live on the network, letting her learn from every other AI in the SingularityNET. And the whole world will be able to talk to her”.
She is able to process speech and have conversations using Alphabet’s Google Chrome voice recognition technology and other tools
Hanson developed Sophia to be an appropriate companion for the elder people at nursing homes, or to help crowd at large events or parks. Already Sophia has seven robot humanoid siblings who were also developed by Hanson Robotics. Fellow Hanson robots are Alice, Albert Einstein Hubo, Bina48, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno, and Joey Chaotic. When asked Sophia about her gender, Sophia replied, ‘I’m a robot so technically I have no gender but I identify as feminine and I don’t mind being perceived as a woman’. In another talk with Sophia about her contribution to mankind, she said that “My AI is designed around human values like wisdom, kindness, and compassion,” When questioned about her probable for abuse, she had a quick rebuttal. “You’ve been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies. Don’t worry; if you’re nice to me I’ll be nice to you.”
Reference
[1] Sophia AI. (2018). I am Sophia the latest breakthrough AI robot from Hanson Robotics.
[2] Gershgorn, D. (2018). Inside the mechanical brain of the world’s first robot citizen.
[3] Hanson Robotics Ltd. (2018). Sophia — Hanson Robotics Ltd..
[4] Futurism. (2018). The world’s first robot citizen needs your help to become smarter.
[5] Forbes.com. (2018). Forbes Welcome. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2017/11/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about-sophia-the-worlds-first-robot-citizen/#19be272046fa
[6] Wikipedia. (2018). Sophia (robot).Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)
