Hanson Robotics was founded almost 10 years ago with the goal of putting a face to the amazing advance made by Artificial Intelligence. Almost a decade has passed and there is already a family of humanoids with whom you can talk and interact, just as you do with a chatbot today, but with the characterization of a person.
Imagine the development that exists today with Artificial Intelligence. Mechanisms such as the GPT Chat or the different apps that create images from text are issues that demonstrate an exceptional advance in technology.
Now imagine those systems or programs installed in a robot that is capable of responding, gesturing or simply interacting with a person. That’s what the people at Hanson Robotics did.
Sophia was the first of this family. About her we have previously spoken in FayerWayer. At the time, it gained notoriety because it was developed to accompany lonely people in the pandemic.
Although it was introduced in 2016, the worst stages of confinement gave Sophia a relaunch. The challenge is to take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to produce thousands of humanoid robots by the end of 2021.
“The coronavirus world is going to need more and more automation to keep people safe,” Hanson said at the time. “It can be useful during these times when people are terribly lonely and socially isolated,” he added. In the passage of these almost two years they did not add up to thousands, but Sophia at least already has two sisters.
Grace and Desdemona: the sisters of Sophia the robot
With Sophia’s two sisters, named Grace and Desdemona, they both happen to look scary. Her faces can be scary when they smile, and the wire mesh at the back of her head doesn’t help much.
However, his goals are to become an ideal robotic assistant for people.
According to the portal 20 Bit, with Grace they came to demonstrate in tests that it is a very effective robot to accompany “very lonely people”. Prominent among these are the elderly who are in the early stages of degenerative brain diseases.
‘Meet Grace, the healthcare robot COVID-19 created’
LOOK: Hanson Robotics developed a new humanoid robot, Grace, designed for the healthcare market to interact with the elderly and those isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic. | ?Reuters pic.twitter.com/hx4949mJrl
— Inquirer (@inquirerdotnet) June 10, 2021
Ben Goertzel, former chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, said at the time that robots have a positive effect on people with dementia.
While on Desdemona’s side the objective is another. According to the aforementioned medium, Hanson Robotics designed it to improvise verbal poetry in response to musical and cultural references with which the AI has been trained.
