Science

Android Arnold Schwarzenegger debuts at CES that can field questions and mimic human expressions


You’ll be back! Creepy humanoid Arnold Schwarzenegger which can work in customer service stuns the crowd at CES by answering questions and mimicking hundreds of different human expressions

  • Robo-C is a android assistant that can mimic the face of another person
  • It has applications in customer service and also as a robotic home assistant
  • Its creators say that the bot can also mimic someone’s personality 
  • Bots cost anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 depending on the model 

Deep in the heart of the CES expo floor, an unexpected Hollywoood actor – a face that most people would recognize – is fielding questions from the crowd.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling jokes; he’s answering questions like ‘what is the biggest country in the world?’ and ‘how do you feel about humans? with varying degrees of success.

The star-studded Q&A session and friendly conversations aren’t a paid endorsement or part of CES programming, but rather a new product by the flashy Russian robotics startup, Promobot, called ‘Android Robo-C.’ 

While this isn’t Promobot’s first time at CES, it’s the debut for Robo-C, which is being positioned as a kind of anthropomorphic office assistant that can handle customer queries and hook up to a smart home to help people interface with other gadgets. 

At CES in Las Vegas, Promobot showcased a replica of actor Arnold

At CES in Las Vegas, Promobot showcased a replica of actor Arnold 

WHAT IS ROBO-C? 

Robo-C is ‘the world’s first humanoid android’ according to its creator, the Russian startup Promobot.

Robo-C can be built with a lifelike human face, with 16 moving parts capable of delivering over 600 facial expressions.

It has an onboard AI containing 100,000 speech modules to it can interact through conversation.

Depending on the user specifications, Robo-C costs between $20,000 and $50,000. 

On the commercial side, the company imagines Robo-C being used in places like hotels to help guests check-in or facilitate payments, or museums to help direct 

According to co-founder of Promobot, Oleg Kivokurtsev, Andorid Robo-C isn’t confined to the visage of Schwarzenegger, it can be remade with a new skin to mimic the preference of its buyer.

‘If you want one with your own appearance or someone else, we can do that,’ Kivokurtsev told MailOnline.

In one special case, he said that a customer in India had Robo-C made to embody the face of her late husband.

And If Robo-C’s ability to mimic facial expressions and people wasn’t enough to give you goosebumps, Kivokurtsev says that the android can be outfitted with different personalities.

It’s in this arena that things start to firmly approach science-fiction.

‘We can make not only appearance look alike, we can make artificial intelligence [using] a brain neural network,’ said Kivokurtsev.

The co-founder claims that using ‘open data’ like information gleaned from social media to help reconstruct a subject’s speech. 

Robo-C is complemented by Promobot's V.4 assistant which is mobile and can be used to help give people tours of museums and more

Robo-C is complemented by Promobot’s V.4 assistant which is mobile and can be used to help give people tours of museums and more

How effective Promobot is at re-creating what Kivokurtsev calls a person’s ‘soul’ remains to be seen as none of the company’s display models used said technology. 

Promobot says it hopes to sell 100 of the robots throughout the next year, though with the base model clocking in at $25,000, that benchmark will be no easy task.

In addition to Robo-C, which is stationary, Promobot also offers a mobile robot, valled V.2 and V.4, that can wheel around semi-autonomously and provide similar services using voice-recognition and computer vision.

Those robots have found jobs in some museums around the world has mechanical tour guides and can also be used in retail and as a concierge. 

 



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