Sophia (robot) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Sophia

Sophia in 2018
Manufacturer	Hanson Robotics
Inventor	David Hanson
Year of creation	2016
Type	Humanoid
Purpose	Technology demonstrator

Sophia is a social humanoid robot developed by the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016, and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States. Sophia is marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behavior and induce feelings of love in humans.

Sophia has been covered by media around the globe, and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country. In November 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion, and is the first non-human to be given a United Nations title.

According to founder David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source. A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).

History

Sophia's internals

Sophia was first activated on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2016. The robot, modeled after the Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and its inventor's wife, Amanda Hanson, is known for its human-like appearance and behavior compared to previous robotic variants. Sophia imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversation on predefined topics (e.g. the weather).

Hanson has said that he designed Sophia to be a suitable companion for the elderly at nursing homes, to help crowds at large events or parks, or to serve in customer service, therapy, and educational applications, and that he hopes that the robot can ultimately interact with other humans sufficiently to gain social skills.

On October 11, 2017, Sophia was introduced to the United Nations with a brief conversation with the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed.

On October 25, when Sophia was scheduled to appear at the Future Investment Summit in Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry for Culture and Information issued a press release on the Saudi Center for International Communication website, announcing that Saudi Arabia was granting citizenship to Sophia. At the Summit, the host interviewing Sophia announced that "We just learned, Sophia – I hope you are listening to me – you have been awarded what is going to be the first Saudi citizenship for a robot", making Sophia the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country. In an interview, Hanson stated that he had been taken by surprise by this turn of events.

On November 21, 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion for Asia and the Pacific. The announcement was made at the Responsible Business Forum in Singapore, an event hosted by the UNDP in Asia and the Pacific and Global Initiatives. On stage, she was assigned her first task by UNDP Asia Pacific Chief of Policy and Program, Jaco Cilliers.

Social media users have used Sophia's citizenship to criticize Saudi Arabia's human rights record. In December 2017, Sophia's creator David Hanson said in an interview that Sophia would use her citizenship to advocate for women's rights in her new country of citizenship.

In 2019, Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits. In 2021, a self-portrait created by Sophia sold for nearly $700,000 at auction.

Sophia has at least nine robot humanoid "siblings" who were also created by Hanson Robotics. Fellow Hanson robots are Alice, Albert HUBO, BINA48, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno, and Joey Chaos. Around 2019–20, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi.

Software

Sophia speaking to a crowd, 2017

Sophia's intelligence software is designed by Hanson Robotics. According to founder David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source. A computer vision algorithm processes input from cameras within Sophia's eyes, giving Sophia visual information on its surroundings. It can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognize individuals. It can process speech and have conversations using a natural language subsystem.

As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. OpenCog Prime, primarily the work of Hanson Robotics' former chief scientist Ben Goertzel, is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system.

Goertzel has described the AI methods that Sophia uses, which include face tracking and emotion recognition, with robotic movements generated by deep neural networks. CNBC has commented on Sophia's "lifelike" skin and its ability to emulate more than 60 facial expressions. Sophia's dialogue is generated via a decision tree, and is uniquely integrated with these outputs. Its speech synthesis ability is provided by CereProc's text-to-speech engine, which also allows it to sing.

Sophia is conceptually similar to the computer program ELIZA, which was one of the first attempts at simulating a human conversation. The software has been programmed to give pre-written responses to specific questions or phrases, like a chatbot. These responses are used to create the illusion that the robot is able to understand conversation, including stock answers to questions like "Is the door open or shut?" Sophia's AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows it to improve responses in the future.

In 2017 Hanson Robotics announced plans to open Sophia to a cloud environment using a decentralized blockchain marketplace. Around January 2018, Sophia was upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk. In 2019, Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits.

A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).

Appearances and interviews

Sophia with Mukhisa Kituyi, Houlin Zhao and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in 2018

Sophia has appeared on CBS 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose, Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan, and outlets like CNBC, Forbes, Mashable, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Sophia was featured in AUDI's annual report and was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of ELLE Brasil. R. Eric Thomas later lampooned Sophia on Elle.com.

Sophia has been interviewed in the same manner as a human, striking up conversations with hosts. Some replies have been nonsensical, while others have impressed interviewers such as 60 Minutes's Charlie Rose.

In an October 2017 interview for CNBC, when the interviewer expressed concerns about robot behavior, Sophia joked that he had "been reading too much Elon Musk. And watching too many Hollywood movies". Musk tweeted that Sophia should watch The Godfather and asked "what's the worst that could happen?"

Business Insider's chief UK editor Jim Edwards interviewed Sophia, and while the answers were "not altogether terrible", he predicted that Sophia was a step towards "conversational artificial intelligence". At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, a BBC News reporter described talking with Sophia as "a slightly awkward experience".

In May 2018, photographer Giulio Di Sturco did a photo shoot of Sophia which appeared in National Geographic. Wired reported on the shoot.

In 2024, Sophia gave the commencement address at D'Youville University in Buffalo, New York. The address took the form of an interview with the president of the Student Government Association.

Citizenship quandary

Saudi Arabia's move of granting citizenship to Sophia immediately raised questions, as commentators wondered if this implied that Sophia could vote or marry, or whether a deliberate system shutdown could be considered murder.

While some sources characterized the move as a publicity stunt on the part of the Saudi government to promote the conference, other sources have treated it seriously. Tyler L. Jaynes writes that there was a "lack of universal acceptance of Sophia the Robot's citizenship and its portrayal and acceptance as a public relations stunt". Jaynes goes on to note that "a refusal to seriously treat this event as being legitimate already displays the struggles that will be faced by patients undergoing surgical augmentation when integrating self-learning artificial intelligence systems (SLAIS) into their chemically organic forms."

Simon Nease, writing in the Penn Political Review, suggests that it was a competitive move on the part of Saudi Arabia to attract AI and robotics companies to the country, noting that "Japan has also made preliminary provisions for AI obtaining citizenship". The British Council has published an article, "Should robots be citizens?", which notes that Sophia was issued a passport and goes on to address the "legal quandary" of robot citizenship.

See also

In Spanish: Sophia (robot) para niños

• ELIZA effect
• Ethics of artificial intelligence
• Stochastic parrot
• Stranger in a Strange Land