UN tech agency rolls out human-looking robots for questions at a Geneva news conference

A United Nations expertise company assembled a bunch of robots that bodily resembled people at a news convention Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an occasion meant to spark dialogue about the way forward for synthetic intelligence.

The 9 robots had been seated and posed upright together with among the individuals who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva convention middle for what the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union billed because the world’s first news convention that includes humanoid social robots.

Among them: Sophia, the primary robotic innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a well being care robotic; and Desdemona, a rock star robotic. Two, Geminoid and Nadine, resembled their makers.

Organizers mentioned the occasion on the AI for Good Global Summit was meant to showcase the capabilities, but additionally the constraints, of robotics and the way these applied sciences may assist the U.N.’s sustainable improvement targets. The media occasion featured introductions from the robots’ companions or creators, and a spherical of inquiries to the robots from reporters.

And whereas the robots vocalized sturdy statements – that robots might be extra environment friendly leaders than people, however would not take anybody’s job away or stage a rebel – organizers did not specify to what extent the solutions had been scripted or programmed by folks.

The summit was meant to showcase “human-machine collaboration,” and among the robots are able to producing preprogrammed responses, based on their documentation. The UNDP’s Sophia, for instance, typically depends on responses scripted by a workforce of writers at Hanson Robotics, the corporate’s web site reveals.

Reporters had been requested to talk slowly and clearly when addressing the robots, and had been knowledgeable that point lags in responses could be due to the web connection and never the robots themselves. That did not forestall awkward pauses, audio issues and a few stilted or inconsistent replies.Popular tech merchandise resembling Apple’s Siri have been utilizing speech recognition expertise to reply to comparatively easy human queries for greater than a decade. But final 12 months’s launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot with a robust command of the semantics and syntax of human language, has triggered worldwide debate concerning the fast development of AI programs.

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