Meet The World's First CITIZEN ROBOT Sophia

A robot has just been granted citizenship -- by Saudi Arabia.

The robot named Sophia was confirmed as a Saudi citizen during a business event in Riyadh.

The move is an attempt to promote Saudi Arabia as a place to develop artificial intelligence -- and, presumably, allow it to become a full citizen.

Sophia is a social humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016 and made her first public appearance at South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in mid-March 2016 in Austin, Texas, United States. It is able to display more than 50 facial expressions.

Sophia Internals

Features

• Sophia uses artificial intelligence, visual data processing and facial recognition.

• Sophia also imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversations on predefined topics (e.g. on the weather).

• Sophia uses voice recognition(speech-to-text) technology from Alphabet Inc. (parent company of Google) and is designed to get smarter over time.

• Sophia's intelligence software is designed by Hanson Robotics.

• The AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows her to improve responses in the future.

Sophia would ultimately be a good fit to serve in healthcare, customer service, therapy and education in future.