Japanese Hospitality Robots Debut At World Expo

Japanese Hospitality Robots Debut At World Expo



Nagakute, Japan (AFP) Mar 09, 2005
Japan will welcome the millions of guests at the World Exposition opening this month with hosts trained to greet them in their language, entertain their children and perform rap music with them. The gracious hosts are robots.
The World Expo, which runs in the central Aichi region for six months from March 25, will be used by Japan as a way to display its technological might, of which a horde of robots is set to be the most potent symbol.

Guests will find that the young women at the information booths who speak four languages are humanoids, that the security contingent includes robots on wheels and that tiny colorful machines will sing for the younger visitors.

Aichi's information booth worker Actroid, developed by Japanese firms Kokoro and Advanced Media, looks like a Japanese woman in her 20s and understands 40,000 phrases each in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean.

The humanoid with realistic eyeballs, eyelashes and moving lips gestures and puts on facial expressions suitable for the more than 2,000 types of answers it can give.

The robot may refuse to answer to sensitive questions for "privacy reasons," making an X with her arms and bowing (I'm going to try that technique!)....cont'd


http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-05m.html
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Strange to have the words 'hospitality' and 'robot' in the same sentence. Kind of reminds me of those Gypsy Fortune Teller automaton vendors.

...Ehm...nevermind.