Well, it is difficult to learn a language and most of us have failed in such an examination at some point in our life. China's home-grown humanoid robot Jia Jia is no exception. The robot did very poorly in her first English-language live "interview" with an American journalist on Monday (24 Apil).
Kevin Kelly, co-founder of the tech magazine Wired asked the robot basic questions which it failed to answer. The Skype interview was conducted from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province, reported the South China Morning Post.
Though Jia Jia could not answer the questions, she, dressed in a traditional Chinese garb, looked confident, smiled and realistically blinked throughout the dialogue.
The robot was unable to respond to questions about the number of letters in the English alphabet, however, replied to a question about the Great Wall's location by saying: "China".Moreover, when Kelly asked her to talk about him, the robot gave an incoherent reply, reported the website.
Jia Jia was developed over three years, at the Hefei University, and is able to interact with humans and understand human languages. But what is more striking is her looks. Her appearance is flawless and looks exactly like a human. According to reports, the robot's appearance was modelled by five women from the university and the main aim was to make the robot look "attractive". Since then she has been given the name Jia Jia, a "robot goddess", by Chinese Internet users.
Following the interviews, Chen Xiaoping, leader of the team developing Jia Jia, said that the robot gave "good answers" to most of the questions but failed to answer some "challenging" ones. "There were some delays due to the network. Apart from that, I think the conversation was successful," he said, as reported.
However, netizens expressed disappointment about Jia Jia's answers and pointed out the robot lacks the inability to engage in basic conversation. They also said that the Chinese humanoid did not match up to the standard of artificial intelligence conversationalists, such as Apple's smart programme Siri or Amazon's intelligent assistant Alexa.
Check out the video here:
