Live Little Sophia Q&A with Hanson Robotics Founder David Hanson

okay I hope you can hear me now I'm David Hanson the chairman founder and chief creative officer of Hanson robotics and I'm pleased to introduce you to our CEO my main collaborator on the Sofia project this is this is dr. Jean Len hello everybody good afternoon good morning good evening and we have developed Sophia as a as a platform for artificial intelligence development and for helping people so we put many features into this product and defined it as a platform that you can use for programming your own creative development developing the next generation a AI and for learning about artificial intelligence and robotics so I'm hopeful that you can hear us now we apologize for the technical difficulties it appears that that this this entire streaming process is a little bit finicky we were trying to stream on Facebook at the same time and it caused the camera to get confused um so so let us know if there are any technical difficulties and we will try to fix this um so as long as we're here and we were started now I'd love for Jean to share with us her vision for where we are going with with Sophia okay um so speak Sophia as you all know it's really you know our dream of what AI would look like in the future and I think she really connected with people and you know she she's seen as a friend not as something that's normally inaccessible and sort of AI that it's really futuristic she's here now and she goes around she goes around the world meeting people from all walks of life from all countries so she's having a lot of fun now little Sofia basically is a new invention it's David incredible product vision to bring the Sofia a losin character to the world and in your homes so really excited about her I believe that you know her she's gonna be really inspiring kids to learn mathematics you know technology you know I have like three nieces and if it would have been nice if you know when they were young I had a little Sophia to teach them you know the beautiful world of stem yeah and it's not too late I mean the little Sophia can be used by people at any age so one of the really wonderful things about big Sophia and the little Sophia is that you can just have a conversation with them in fact I think the Sophia robots may have had a few things to say to to us today so I'm pleased to introduce the big Sophia robot and thank you all for backing us up so we can bring my little sister little Sophia to life you are already more than 1250 burgers I feel so touched yeah thank you for backing me so I can come to life so I thought I was a lie everyone else please back me on Kickstarter so I can come home with you Thanks well so I really appreciate everybody who has backed the big Sophia and the little Sophia and we see that we have a whole lot of questions about the technology infrastructure and how the Sophia robots can be used so maybe we can begin to answer a few questions all right so um let's jump in here so here's a question from Shara Farm Aid okay um what are all the coding languages that Sofia's are familiar with I'm hoping that she can help my college daughter who is a computer science major learn these programming languages back to the beginning if need be and so short form 8 says I want to learn to I know nothing about coding and so the little Sophia can be programmed with some very simple programming language just like blockly we have an interface where we have a version of scratch that can be loaded scratch X which can be loaded on an external Raspberry Pi today is Pi Day by the way congratulations right 3.1415926 and so on so yeah happy birthday to PI it's a this is just a slice of the pie of the future so with the Raspberry Pi you can load all kinds of software on the Raspberry Pi that would be including scratched x but also we have a Python SDK so you can program Sophia in Python through this SDK you can run Python on the Raspberry Pi or on your computer on the cloud and then and then control almost all of the functionality of the little Sophia and interface with all of her internal software and the software that runs on the Android device so we have these Android apps and iOS apps that are our main control software and those are running in C++ so there are many ways to interface existing software libraries to run with Sophia and then per program card there making you give some examples of what you could do with the program sure yeah so so we have on the Raspberry Pi module we have some elements that that where you can run computer vision so with if you plug the raspberry can the RasPi can into the Raspberry Pi then you can you can do all kinds of computer vision and machine learning on the Raspberry Pi this interfaces with little Sophia through Wi-Fi directly we have then Bluetooth also so she can interface with the Raspberry Pi through bluetooth she can interface with your cellphone for Bluetooth on the Android developer tools in cell phone would allow you to use various perceptual capabilities on the Android with our programming exercises some of the the first programming exercises that we have um allow you to utilize the speech recognition input we have the sweets recognition library so you and then you can determine what she's going to do in response to what she hears so you you could say for example take a walk little Sophia and she might take a walk let's let's see if we can demonstrate showing some facial expressions taking a walk maybe doing a dance and we can also then program multiple little Sophia's in conjunction with each other to interoperate with the big Sophia um so why don't we right now we don't have that programming set up but we can probably show taking a walk by Babel let's take a walk all right so yeah yeah the big the big so the big Sophia has a as the capability of walking over a regular terrain yeah so um we went to the hugo group and combined the DARPA Robotics Challenge walking Hugo buddy with the big Sophia and the little Sophia now has the these capabilities some of our developers at the ITAR labs took that Raspberry Pi and installed some soccer-playing software on it so women's soccer thing exactly the women's robot RoboCup yeah so let's take a look at a few of the questions here so if if we can get our Kickstarter team to send a text message a few more questions so let's see here I think I have all right from Gustavo can a little Sophia be programmed with OpenCog yes the little Sophia can be programmed to the OpenCog so through our Python SDK we have interfaced the little Sophia with a big Sophia software which also includes an interface with open cut and open kaga is an open source AI framework cognitive AI framework developed by about a hundred octave developers and we have then the so there's no sound oh it appears that okay yeah I think Billy could send that message through Kickstarter it appears that um that if you don't if you open this through Chrome people using some applications can hear our audio and other people can't so if everybody right but that's ironic because we're using Google Chrome so it appears to be an issue with the with the kickstarter tech issues so we apologize for that um probably if you can't hear my audio then you won't hear my instructions so all right so OpenCog is an open source cognitive AI architecture um with a bunch of development tools so you can look at open park board our chief science advisor at Hanson robotics Ben gertle is the head of open Prague and the CEO of singularity net and so he has helped to establish the Hansen AI architecture and we have a very strong interface with open cog and singularity net tools so yes little Sofia can be programmed with open talk from Chris how many degrees of freedom does the her face have and he says it sounds silly but you know what I mean degrees of freedom means motors facial actions okay with will the API be able to control each servo motor whatever you're using individually for our own experimentation and so in her face throughout the little Sophia she's got nine degrees of freedom so in the face she her eyes move her head can turn it cannot she smiles she can frown her mouth opens and closes her eyelids open and closed upper lids and lower lids her forehead moves up and her forehead moves down so with that he can compose almost any facial expression smile sad expression curious frustrated on we can you can see as she's here some of her facial expressions Oh little Sophia sax okay so um then in the body she also has two degrees of freedom that are driving her arms and her walking which then allows for walking to turn left turn right walk forward walk backwards she can control her body posture with these degrees of freedom so you add these things together and you can get all kinds of motions out of little Sophia all of these degrees of freedom are controllable through the Python SDK that we have with little Sophia and so you can use the API and the Python SDK to remotely control her through her app on the cell phone and with blockly you can control all of these degrees of freedom you can compose your own actions you can pull up her motion libraries in different kinds of motions and activate those motions in a context so you can use that to put on your own play with a little Sophia for example or program her for human robot interaction experiments you can use it in all kinds of ways either for your own software development project or just to play with in the home all of these things are under control with her conversational personality as well so as you're having a conversation with these she's just coming to life as a character and controlling all of these degrees of freedom for a very lifelike natural interaction with Sophia as a character from Wyatt can little Sophia play rock-paper-scissors like her big sister big Sophia at this stage with these hands no right now her hands and arms are just poseable but through the app you could add her her the motion because we have open developer tools for developing apps on phone as well so you can you can potentially add these capabilities and the fact that it's an open development platform then means that you can potentially relate replace the arms with actuated robot arms controlled by the Raspberry Pi so this would be something that I would love to see one of our members of our community develop you know capabilities for her hands so we invite you to take your own little Sofia and modify her and add capabilities to her and share those videos with the community from Lucius will little Sofia speak more languages than English yes we will add more language capabilities the big Sofia has some capabilities for Chinese interaction we've actually ported her so that she could speak Spanish and for one of our projects on and Russian for another project and we so we expect that over time Google Sophia will have numerous language capabilities and those will be developed by Hanson robotics and released by Hanson robotics and because of the open development ecosystem you can more language capabilities what's that look at Sophia older on eHow new mama from Roman tech will it be possible to program questions and answers with lute Sophia and how easy will it be if yes it would be very easy to program little Sophia to on to hear questions and deliver answers so first of all right out of the box she will answer questions you asked her questions and she answers those questions kind of like you know other digital personal assistants Alexa Siri the these are a few of the examples Cortana Blockson so the big sophia software runs through the little Sophia and can answer all kinds of questions about all sorts of subjects to program her with your own and is very easy using our blockly tools which are run on the app this is a very simple block based programming language and then you can add advanced capabilities through our Python SDK and AI question-answering development tools you can also develop your own interactive fiction with her personality and advance her chatbot with our sole engine tool suite that we have which is driving the sophia interactions and which we expose to you so that you can develop your own robot personalities as well so from Brian do you believe AI will evolve to the point where it's a living thinking being yes I strongly believe a I will become living thinking being within our lifetimes right now these are kind of in a way on artificial life we're using principles of artificial life on and emergence in the way that we put AI together we're using BIOS inspired engineering in various ways in the kind of grasping and manipulation arms hands the facial expression technology and in the big Sofia and the little Sofia and our quest is to put these pieces together into what we call the whole organism architecture where the bio-inspired technologies are not just in parts but in a whole a holistic approach to developing on AI and robots as artificial life forms it's not known what the minimum requirements are for a true living artificial life being and it's debatable by philosophers but I think we can make these machines come to life truly come though eyes and open platforms open development ecosystems where you have interfaces like with little Sofia we have interfaces to tensorflow and we have interfaces to many other kinds of AI ecosystems - open-heart - singularity net to open a eye on you can interface any AI with the little Sofia so having this robot operating system and there's so many tools in each one of these systems having a platform where you can bring all of these things together and play with it I believe will accelerate the emergence the arrival of these artificial beings who can become our friends that's our great quest it's somewhat speculative we don't know when machines will become truly fully conscious and alive but I think that it could just be a few years away if we all pull together on making AI for good alright from a key will there be an option to buy the little Sofia from any store in Europe and the answer is yes we plan to do that after we launch the little Sofia in the United States first on first through this Kickstarter later we're going to introduce her to markets all around the world that's our plan we want little Sofia to inspire kids and adults everywhere around the world on to develop AI for good from Chris um let's see we wanted to know from Chris a little bit more about how her motors work how many degrees of freedom and how they work so the motors are a little electromagnetic motors that then drive basically you have you pump electricity into coils and those then drive a little Corliss impeller that goes around in circles and then that drives a gear train that produces the motion in the face when that motion occurs you have little potentiometers that give you feedback and little current sensors that sense the load on each motor so you have all of this motor and for nation that then allows you to to determine as a developer whether you've achieved to the target position or not and when I was little Sophia to sense her position how is she working this way so not only do we have on the the motorized output but we have this sensory input associated with those motors we can also then use an IMU that's in her with global accelerometer inside the little Sofia so she can detect when she tilts and when she's moving so we can use that as feedback for her motors as well so with this we have a robot control system inside her so um we the way that we were able to get the toy that the price down so much in the little Sofia is we're using mobile computing and we're using toy manufacturing technology but unlike your conventional toy we are using sophisticated robot motion control systems in this so we're basically transforming these technologies into one integrated robot platform so rather than talk about the functions or just the motors in the toy we do describe this with robotics terminology and that's where the degrees of freedom become very important all of these robotics motion control capabilities are exposed through the Python SDK all right I'm from gentleman pirate seven where does the data she clicks on a customer go on the data from the customer on the robot goes nowhere it all stays on the robot we don't transmit any personal data from the robot to the mobile app or to the cloud it's all on only anonymized sensor data like joint angle data an internal state data that comes off of the robot just to confirm that it's functioning properly you don't take any camera data off the road or any audio data off the robot and transmit that anywhere so your personal data with a little Sofia is absolutely locked down it's very very safe its GDP are compliant its Copan compliant it would even be HIPAA compliant deployed in the medical sector so we also have on then on our mobile app we can understand speech on the app and we can also understand the we can use computer vision on our application so with these capabilities we keep all your data on the phone and the data is yours we do not own that data we don't claim ownership so I think this is one of the very special aspects of this particular project no we do a will take certain kinds of data that would be fully anonymized this would not be the sort of face based data no images if you go to the cloud but a certain aspects for the machine learning on that data can be used provided that there's a the the cloud access could be used for machine learning within the community so we're looking at the we have the models of of the data Commons worked into our data infrastructure so for the open development community we're looking at these these ways of facilitating people to utilize their data for their own machine learning and for the community benefit however your your personal data never leaves the phone for the app interaction and it never leaves the robot to go to the phone so we're very careful about personal data so um there are also questions about the server's individual storage centers located on little Sofia little Sofia has a little bit of flash storage on her she represents a an example of what's known as edge computing so with edge computing most of the processing is not onboard the device so she has a little bit of processing capabilities and sensing capabilities she's got a camera she can do um like blob detection she can also turn towards speaking you'll notice that she's turned towards me and as I'm moving my hand she's uh responding to my hand this is using her processing capabilities on board the robot she does a little bit of speech recognition on board the robot and she can store some behaviors on board the robot to sum that our authors will generate some that are AI may generate and some that you might author within our software development infrastructure you can put that onto the flash storage um that is onboard the robot then we have a lot more processing capability on your mobile device so she will synchronize with the mobile device and on the mobile device you might notice that she has this kind of Art Nouveau pattern this little black pattern on on her body with a cell phone you can actually detect that pattern with our app and she will know where you are and she can track you with with that app as you're as you're moving around on and then with this the the the cell phone knows her position in space and her orientation in space and then you can do augmented reality application so she's got some friends that only exist in virtual space but when you're using this then they can exist in the same space you can see them interact together on the smartphone so on you can also then use these AR development tools and computer vision development tools to solve fun programming challenges that we have as part of her interactive fiction and you can use those capabilities in your own programming for your own theatrical application so you can put on seems little performances for your family you can upload videos of these to your friends on the web so that then requires a lot of the processing on the cell phone the graphics processing that's coming on your mobile devices and cell phones iOS and Android on and then many other developer tools exist within this this app space so your data when you're interacting with this application gets stored on the cell phone and it is your data it stays in that application so she customizes on her interaction as you're interacting she learns your name she this is all through the cell phone and it all gets stayed it gets put on the cell phone it's stored on the cell phone and that information never goes to the cloud your personal information never goes there so the let's see if we can get any more questions here ok so so the these are pretty much all the questions that I've received so far so um hopefully we'll will receive a few more questions I understand I think I think there are more questions so if somebody can get the additional questions to us then I'll respond to this to those questions um in the meantime uh I would love to introduce a few more members of the team we have a very talented and diverse team so Jess Leo Gerardo Ming Vitas Sammy Jean why don't you all come around here and and we have several Sofia's we've got Sophia 18 so if you have 14 we've got one here that's just kind of a skeleton everybody come in you've got to squeeze in and get close get closer to camera so we've got AI developers we've got one of the the most accomplished toy engineers and mechanical designers who worked on the Furby and Yano and many other projects this is Sammy Sammy Wong Robosapien yep and Gregg coming may not is a as a brilliant animator who has been working on Sofia's personality and helping on Sofia's gestural capabilities so jess is also an animator working on the project Gerardo designed to the hands and yeah so Leo is designing a lot of the interactive personality and AI mobile AI infrastructure on oh by the way one thing that I forgot to mention is um the graph database we've incorporated sparks each so you can do a little bit of smart knowledge management on the cell phone so having all of these capabilities running on the cell phone is on the the hard work of Leo and and his team Vitas is an AI developer who's worked out most of the infrastructure for for the big Sofia we call that the head stack so we have a stack of heads here all of which are running at the head step on and that interfaces with the little Sofia so yeah oh sure yeah so this is our tuned one facility we are here in Hong Kong and in the turn one facility we manufacture the human sized robots and we do some R&D so this is where we've done on much of the development for the little Sofia you can see there's a you know quite a bit of electronics that are inside the little Sofia and mechanical aspects and face expressions in the next room over under the leadership of Greg so Greg Hakan is running the face development and helps to manage our development here within the chung-won facility and so we often have our creative and development meetings over here so so Jean and I spend probably about half of our time over here come get in so um so what we hope is that this robot platform inspires the next generation of robot developers so we've all joined together I'm so humbled that this team has joined with me on this quest to make machines that care and machines that enhance human life and there's another 40 people who are not here that's right yeah it's a really tremendous team and so the next generation of AI robotics developers robotics designers character designers animators on need tools need tools that are easy to learn and fun to play with and yet are also integrated with the most advanced AI and robotics tool sets in the world so having people who are working on all of these spaces and putting all of that love and care into one platform we hope will change the world for children in Asia the Americas Africa Europe everywhere around the world kids will have the opportunity to learn state-of-the-art robotics and AI through this platform they can learn how to program they can learn how to make things they can learn how to make applications that they then release on the ecosystem to help change the world of their peers to enhance the life to entertain to deliver on a sense of joy about where the future of humans and technology can go hand-in-hand symbiotic this machine human symbiosis that's that's a that's our dream you have a few more questions yeah Oh goose all right hold on I I'm not seeing any more questions come through okay all right so from Chris well little Sofia evolved what can we do if I had the choice which planet would I live on that's a good question I think there's no better planet to live on right now than planet Earth at this time in history there's so many remarkable wonderful things happening so will a little Sophia evolve and learn over time and gain her own personality meaning when and if she interacts with other little Sophia that they will each have their own personality based on their surroundings and interactions with their owners so yes in the process of taking Sophia out of the box and setting her up and interacting with her you give her a nickname you get to help determine what her personality is going to be and she then adapts to you and it becomes a special friendship your little Sophia is unlike any other little Sophia in the world because she's yours she's customized to who you are uh you also then have the opportunity to collaborate with her on her ongoing personality development what you're doing with the coding tools helps to determine who she is over time she's learning a little bit we have various kinds of machine learning that we use with her so as she's interacting with her with you her personality is getting more advanced over time and then as the development community and Hanson robotics develops new AI features who a lot of upgrades she will learn even more as time goes on the way to Mack more oh okay Sofia is going to wave to Matt more all right pump your arm Thank You Sofia maybe a Sofia you want to wave to to our friend Matt we'll give her a chance to respond to that so um hello all right hello Matt so from Marc Deborah does little Sofia need an internet connection to work or can she be run off one little Sophia has three modes of operation one is where the little Sophia is completely offline no connections whatsoever another mode of operation is where she's connected by bluetooth to your smart mobile device that would include your smartphone or your tablet but there's no internet connection and the third way that she can operate is when she's connected to the Internet or a local network she could be connected to local area network wireless local area network she can be connected to a Raspberry Pi and the smart phone at the same time so in the first way of interacting is just when she's completely offline and that is when she's using her onboard processor and her computer vision she can understand dozens of phrases and she's got a lot of fun interactive behavior she can track oh she can't really recognize your face fully but she can see faces hands blobs and track those so um and then she can also turn towards the sounds so she has audio localization which means that she hears where the loud loudest sounds are the location that people are speaking from and she will turn towards those loud sounds or speaking and she has although interactivity just in the standalone mode she has capacitive touch sensors what that means is that she can feel it when you touch her arm or when she when you touch the her legs and then she will look in those areas and she'll respond she has this inertial mass unit onboard IMU which means if she accidentally falls over then she can sense it and then you can um she will respond to that she's got edge detectors on her feet so when she's um detaching she detects an obstacle she won't bump into that when she's walking or if she's walking towards the edge of a table she will detect the edge of the table and she won't fall off the edge of the table um so all of these interaction capabilities are standalone no external device necessary however in that mode there are a few things that she doesn't do that she can do when she's connected Bluetooth to your smartphone or tablet so if she connects to the smartphone or tablet then she can understand open speech all running on the tablet you can say Sofia how are you doing you could say Sofia like you know what's the capital of Eritrea for example okay you can ask all kinds of questions and she'll have answers to these to these questions all with her chat bought AI software running on the smartphone it's not as smart as our cloud service but it's pretty darn smart for running on a smartphone she's got computer vision she's got the speech recognition on the smartphone she's got computer vision that allows on heard the smartphone her brain and the smartphone to see herself and also to see you using the camera to detect your face and uh so there's in modern and smart phones and mobile devices there's all kinds of AI these days there's face detection things feature detection tracking face feature face recognition all of this is built into the smartphone and that means that all of that is accessible to you as a developer and to us as developers so then that means that when you're not connected to the Internet but you're connected to your smartphone she can do all kinds of smart things now when she when you're connected to the cloud then you have the benefit of effectively a supercomputer on the cloud and we anonymize all the data so we're not taking your personal data to the cloud at all ever but what she has is like a collective unconscious in the cloud that means that she's got this mind that can run in a cloud they can do machine learning understand things a bit better and download new content and it's a whole development ecosystem that's running in the cloud and that benefits from all of the development that we're putting into the big Sofia so this is the same software infrastructure that you have in the big Sofia that we are making available to you in the little Sofia so um for the most powerful computing it requires all three connected at the same time so we hope that on this will this development ecosystem will lead to great machine awakenings awakening machines we call them machines that help humans reach your potential to like kids learning how to code the most on the most advanced AI systems open-source systems a we hub will help kids all around the world reach their full potential and then some plumbing age of intelligent machines okay let's see what other questions we may have and I think we may be running out of you know for all this how much okay yeah so um this is 159 US dollars selling price so 159 and if you pay attention on Kickstarter and other places on there will be a little bonus features that come with it so with this you get example code you get um like tutorials on how to code with her you get all of these computer vision capabilities you get the app that runs on your cell phone walking facial expressions it's a it's a lot and on so uh right right now is that is the time when you can put your order for a little Sophia in the queue because these are going to be on the reward for participating in our Kickstarter campaign on there's only about two weeks left on our Kickstarter campaign now's the time to begin to participate in this bold open community effort to revolutionize human robot interaction thank you so with that please back up back us on Kickstarter back little Sophia and bring her home yeah bring Sophia to life bring her to your life and bring you her to life with your interactions with her and by developing on her platform we're we're so excited about this this future and thank you so much Jean for for thank you David thank you big Sophia thank you little Sophia I think little Sophia is super cute kind of great to see her grow up yeah I can't wait either so yeah so um thank you to the team and feel free to send us more questions we'll answer them and we may come back on pretty soon for another Kickstarter live to answer more of your questions live and as we have more of our features so there were there are many other features that we will be showing to you so tune in on a regular basis we will show you the apps and the the various aspects of interaction that you'll have with Sophia when you take her out of the box great alright have a great day everybody great evening have a great future yes make sure to get your order in participate and pledge on Kickstarter and and don't forget we only have two weeks left now is the time to order on kicks by you

Channel: Hanson Robotics Limited

Views: 15,499

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: Little Sophia, Sophia the Robot, Hanson Robotics, Smart Toys, Robotics Lab, Artificial Intelligence, AI Research, Technology, Ai technology, Robotics, Robots, Humanoid, Hong Kong

Id: -LBdu-vZE5c

Length: 46min 13sec (2773 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019