All you need to know about world’s first robot citizen Sophia
Sophia a fine looking woman with doe brown eyes had become the international news headlines. Sophia was declared as a citizen of Saudi Arabia on October 25, during the Future Investment Initiative Summit which was held in Capital city of Riyadh. Sophia was the first robot to achieve such a status in the world.
Who is Sophia?
Sophia is a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics a Hong-Kong based company. She made her first appearance in mid-march 2016 at South By Southwest Festival held in Austin, Texas, UnitedStates. In her first appearance, she was able to display more than 60 facial expressions.
Companies Involved in making Sophia:
Hanson Robotics in collaboration with the developers in Artificial Intelligence, including Alphabet IncGoogle’s parent company and SingularityNET.Sophia was modeled after the British actress Audrey Hepburn. The robot Sophia is also known for her human-like appearance and behavior compared to the previous robots. The manufacture of the robot, David Hanson said that Sophia uses artificial intelligence, facial recognition and also the visual data processing. Sophia can also make use and imitate human hand gestures and the facial expressions and also Sophia is capable of answering specific questions and also making some of the discussions on the predefined topics. Alphabet Inc. designed the voice recognition technology for Sophia and it is designed to get smarter over time. The company SingularityNET designed Sophia’s intelligence software, the Ai program analyses the conversation happening and extracts the data which is used to improve the response of the robot in the future.
Features of Sophia:
the robot Sophia is conceptually similar to the natural language processing computer program ELIZA. ELIZA was created to stimulate the communication between humans and the machines. This
stimulates the conversation using the string or the pattern matching and the substitution methodology. The software is programmed to give the pre-responses for the set of specific questions or the phrases. The inputs and the responses are processed with blockchain technology and the information is shared in a cloud network.The eyes of Sofia are cameras are processed with some of the computer algorithms which allow her to see. Sophia has the ability to follow the faces, maintain the eye contact, and the important feature is that it can identify the individuals. Recently the features of Sophia are extended with the functional legs and the ability to walk. At present, the walking speed of Sophia is slow, the makers said that in coming days Sophia will have an ability to run also.
About Sophia’s mechanical brain:
The architect of Sophia’s brain, Ben Goertzel CTO and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics says that Sophia is having a mesh of bot robotics and the chatbot software, and it doesn’t have the intelligence like a human to give quick and innovative responses.He also added that Sophia is all of user-interface than a human being, which means it can be
programmed to run different codes for the different situations. Broadly Sophia’s software is divided
into three configurations:
1. Speech reciting robot: Goertzel said that Sophia is pre-loaded with some of the text that she should speak and then it uses some of the machine learning algorithms to match the pauses
and the facial expressions to the text.
2. Robotic chatbot: Sophia sometimes runs a dialogue system, where it can look and listen to the people to what they say and pick some of the pre-loaded responses in it based on what
the opposite person says and some of the other information is gathered from the internet.
3. Research platform for AI research: the robot Sophia doesn’t have quick responses but can answer simple questions.
Saying about their AI, Goertzel said that their AI is one of the best AI in today’s world. The AI they are working on can identify what the image is at a quick speed and accuracy. It can translate speech into words and translate snippets of the text from one language to another language. It can also predict the outcomes from the previous performances.
