"Please be my friend," said Hanson, CEO and founder of Hanson Robotics. "That's a very flattering offer," said Sophia.
Sophia's lifelike skin is made from patented silicon and she can emulate more than 62 facial expressions. Cameras inside her "eyes," combined with computer algorithms, enable her to "see," follow faces and appear to make eye contact and recognize individuals. A combination of Alphabet's Google Chrome voice recognition technology and other tools enable Sophia to process speech, chat and get smarter over time. Hanson is working with IBM and Intel to explore integrating some of their technologies.

"Our goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human," said Hanson. "We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications."
Hanson said that one day robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Robots walk, play, teach, help and form real relationships with people, he said.

"The artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where they will truly be our friends," he said. "Not in ways that dehumanize us, but in ways the rehumanize us, that decrease the trend of the distance between people and instead connect us with people as well as with robots." Hanson plans to announce pricing and availability of his humanlike robots later this year.

The key to creating robots that care about humans is giving them humanlike faces that enable them to gather data while real humans explore different applications for the technology, said Hanson.

"That can really help to prevent some of the disconnect and possible dangers of developing superintelligent or human-level machines that don't care," he said.

"Gemini" is Latin name for "twins" and the root of "Geminoid," a robot created by Hiroshi Ishiguro in his own likeness. Geminoid has a plastic skull, metal skeleton and silicon skin and is controlled by an external computer.

Ishiguro created Geminoid in order to study humans, which he believes are not that different from robots. "We are more autonomous and more intelligent — that's it," he said.

Ishiguro is creating a line of robots with different functions in mind. The most human-looking robots are best suited to roles such as hotel receptionists, museum tour guides and language tutors, he said. His own tests found that 80 percent of people greeted his most human-like androids with a "hello," initially mistaking them for real people.

Also. As long as it doesn't do this stuff when you talk to it I'd be fine with it.