China's Bank of Communications is utilizing robots to serve as lobby receptionist, which help in entertaining queries, ushering, guiding, and chatting with bank visitors.
Jiaojiao, a humanoid robot a 90cm robot with a square face and a big smile, is the first generation of robot that can really communicate with people.
The robots also processes voices in a memory system that allows it to identify previous visitors, who will be personally greeted them in their succeeding visits.
The robot costs US$15,700, has comprehensive systems such as an advanced sound retriever, which can restore sound lost during audio compression; text-to-speech; and natural language understanding, which can analyse the human voice.
It was jointly developed by the Nanjing University of Science and Electronic Information Technology Corporation and a consortium of Chinese tech companies.Jiaojiao is now being employed by the Bank of Communications's Guangzhou branch but 20 of it will soon be used in
branches around the country.
Commercial utilization of robots is beginning to be a trend.
In April 13 this year, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi showcased a robot bank teller at its Tokyo branch.
A programmable 58cm mini-robot, NAO has multiple sensors, replies to customer with pre-recorded responses and
currently speaks Japanese, English and Chinese.
NAO is manufactured by French robot maker Aldebaran Robotics, which also produces telecom giant SoftBank's Pepper.It is also being developed to help assist foreign customers during the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
Then beginning in 20 April, Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi began using a lifelike android robot built that is
able to talk, sing, gesture and cry like a 32-year-old Japanese woman.
ChihiraAico, built by electronics manufacturer Toshiba, has been programmed to communicate in Japanese, English,
Korean, Chinese and Japanese sign language.
It also features technology developed by Japanese robotics expert Hiroshi Ishiguro
The robot contains 43 motors that enable it to move and Toshiba has separately been developing it to move its body as
and sync her voice to the movements of her jaw and lips.