Android Erica on TV

A lifelike robot named Erica is due to become an on-air news anchor in Japan.

20:16 13 February 2018

A lifelike android created by the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University is due to become an on-air news anchor in Japan.

Named Erica, the robot is designed to look like a 23-year-old Japanese woman with the capability to read news on air while sitting behind a news desk.

She also has speech generation algorithms and speech recognition, allowing it to have live exchanges with humans. It can also track faces with its facial recognition and infrared sensors.

 

Erica’s creator, Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro is a prominent and controversial figure in the robotic world partly because of his view on human-robot intimacy.