Yang Yang was one of the robots unveiled at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) 2015 in Beijing in April. (Photo : www.dailymail.co.uk)
Foreign manufacturers are interested in selling their humanoid robots in the Chinese market as displays of their products increase in the country, the China Business News reported.
Among these humanoid robots include Yang Yang, a "female" humanoid created by Japanese professor Hiroshi Ishiguro which debuted at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing in April. Another one is Sophia, the first mass-produced low-cost humanoid unveiled by Hanson Robotics at the T-Edge Innovation Summer Summit in Beijing in June.
Hanson Robotics CEO David Hanson said that the company is working with Xiaoi, a Chinese virtual voice assistant developer, to enable the English-speaking Sophia to speak Chinese.
Hanson, which is based in Hong Kong, said that they aim to get close to Chinese and Asian customers.
Ishiguro presented several possible uses of humanoids in the past, as a tool used in education and recreation of speeches and performances and in games.
Hanson added that human-like robots can also be used in training medical staff or to interact and assist visitors in theme parks.
The report, however, noted that most humanoid developers in China work in universities, not in the business world, despite foreign interest in the humanoid market in China, where artificial intelligence is a popular topic.
According to the report, several technical challenges must be overcome before humanoids can be offered to consumers and the commercial market. These include creating a stable voice recognition technology that will enable the robots to speak with emotions and tones. Humanoids also have poor comprehension and do not have the ability to understand sentences correctly.
Hanson, however, expressed confidence about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, as robotics technology developed more rapidly in the past five years than in the last five decades.
