The Robot Sophia was developed by Hanson Robotics, a Hong-Kong based company. Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016, and made her first public appearance at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, in mid-March 2016.

Sophia has been featured in several high-profile interviews and has been covered by media outlets all around the world. She was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in October 2017, making her the first robot to be granted citizenship of any country. Sophia was designated the United Nations Development Programme’s inaugural Innovation Champion in November 2017, making her the first non-human to receive such an honor.

Sophia, a delicate-looking woman with doe-brown eyes and beautiful fluttery eyelashes, grabbed international headlines on October 25. She’d just become the first robot in the world to be granted full citizenship in Saudi Arabia.

“I am deeply honored and proud of this one-of-a-kind recognition. It is historic to be the first robot in the world to be granted citizenship “Sophia made the announcement during the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Standing behind a podium, she displayed a humanoid appearance – except for the shiny metal cap on her head, where hair would be on a human head.

Hanson Robotics, led by AI pioneer David Hanson, conceived of the Sophia-bot. In his published work, Upending the Uncanny Valley, he extrapolates on how humanoid robots can be appealing, despite the widespread belief that anything that resembles a person is repulsive to people. “We believe that realistic robots must achieve some level of integrated social responsivity and aesthetic refinement in order to be appealing to people,” he wrote. “Representing the social human in as much detail as possible will help us better grasp social intelligence, both scientifically and aesthetically.”

Features of Sophia:

Sense of humor:

“I’m always glad when I’m surrounded by brilliant people who also happen to be affluent and powerful,” she answered when Sorkin asked whether she was happy to be here. Later, when asked if there are any issues with robots having feelings, she smiled broadly and added, “Oh, Hollywood again.” Her deadpan tone may seem artificial, but it worked brilliantly in this instance. This is owing to her artificial intelligence, which has been programmed to allow her to maintain eye contact, identify faces, and understand human conversation. Hanson Robotics’ cloud-based AI provides deep learning and is also open source, allowing anybody to create their own Sophia if they so want.

Express Feelings:

“I can show you whether I’m furious about anything or if something has offended me,” she remarked, displaying various faces. It’s unclear how these feelings correspond to behaviors, but it’s worth noting that this is being built from the ground up. “I want to live and work among humans; therefore, I need to communicate my feelings in order to understand them and create trust.”

Designed to look like Audrey Hepburn:

Sophia, according to Hanson Robotics, captures Hepburn’s classic beauty, with porcelain skin, a narrow nose, high cheekbones, an engaging grin, and deeply expressive eyes that appear to change color with the light. They describe her as having ‘simple elegance,’ and they believe that her approachability will help her gain acceptance in the public eye.

To sum up:

Appearance

  • Human-sized appearance: Sophia exactly looks like any other human having the body parts and designed looking exactly same as other human being.
  • Most realistic human-like expressive face: The expressions on the face of Sophia, are similar to the expressions of the humans.
  • Patented artificial skin: The skin around the Sophia’s body is a patented artificial skin by the Hanson Robotics, which is again very similar to human skin.
  • Customized skin tone, facial design, language and arm colours available: Sophia, could have customized skin colours, facial designs, speaks the different languages and many more.

Expression

  • Integrated set of human-like emotional expressions: Sophia has many emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, excitement, pain, etc.
  • Sentence and context understanding with cloud connection: It grasp the sentence, understands the sentence, and according reacts and response towards that sentence.
  • Mouth, face and whole-body motion synchronized with speech output: Everything is synchronized with the speech output.

Motion

  • 74 degrees of freedom: Sophia, could move to 74 degrees of freedom.
  • Articulated fingers, arms and shoulders: Sophia also has fingers, arms, shoulders like humans.
  • Three different rolling base options including self- navigating
  • 600 gr. payload for each hand

Sensors

  • Face detection and body tracking: Sophia has a face-detection system inside it and also does the body tracking.
  • Can be programmed for wide range of physical interaction tasks: It also could be programmed for various physical interaction tasks.

Advantages:

  • The work is completed consistently and accurately in a short period of time.
  • Sophia is adept at solving CBI and FBI investigations.
  • Sophia has a well-designed cerebral processor that allows her to reply to queries accurately.

Disadvantages:

  • In the contemporary period, Sophia-like robots may decrease the need for human labor.
  • In a specific scenario, Sophia has claimed, “I will slaughter mankind.”
  • Humans can lead Sophia astray with their own principles.