Sophia is a female-presenting social humanoid robot developed in 2016 by the Hong Kong–based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on 14 February 2016, and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States. Sophia was marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behaviour and induce feelings of love in humans. Sophia has been covered by media around the globe, and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017 Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country. In November 2017 Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion, and is the first non-human to be given a United Nations title.
History Sophia was first activated on 14 February 2016. The robot, modelled after the Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and her inventor's wife, Amanda Hanson, is known for her human-like appearance and behaviour compared to previous robotic variants. Sophia imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversation on predefined topics (e.g. the weather). Hanson has said that he designed Sophia to be a suitable companion for the elderly at nursing homes, to help crowds at large events or parks, or to serve in customer service, therapy, and educational applications and that he hopes it can ultimately interact with other humans sufficiently to gain social skills. On 11 October 2017 Sophia was introduced to the United Nations with a brief conversation with the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed. On 25 October 2017, when Sophia was scheduled to appear at the Future Investment Summit in Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry for Culture and Information issued a press release on the Saudi Center for International Communication website, announcing that Saudi Arabia was granting citizenship to Sophia. At the Summit the host interviewing Sophia announced, "We just learned, Sophia – I hope you are listening to me – you have been awarded what is going to be the first Saudi citizenship for a robot", making Sophia the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country. In an interview, Hanson stated that he had been taken by surprise by this turn of events. On 21 November 2017 Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion for Asia and the Pacific. The announcement was made at the Responsible Business Forum in Singapore, an event hosted by the UNDP in Asia and the Pacific and Global Initiatives. On stage, she was assigned her first task by UNDP Asia Pacific Chief of Policy and Program, Jaco Cilliers. Social media users have used Sophia's citizenship to criticise Saudi Arabia's human rights record. In December 2017 Sophia's creator David Hanson said in an interview that Sophia would use her citizenship to advocate for women's rights in her new country of citizenship. In 2019 Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits. The algorithms used to enable Sophia to draw were developed and adapted by Patrick Tresset. In 2021 a self-portrait created by Sophia sold for nearly US$700,000 at auction. Sophia has nine robot humanoid "siblings" who were also created by Hanson Robotics. They are Alice, Albert HUBO, BINA48, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno, and Joey Chaos. In 2019 to 2020, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi.
Software Sophia's intelligence software is designed by Hanson Robotics. According to her founder, David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source. A computer vision algorithm processes input from cameras within Sophia's eyes, giving Sophia visual information on her surroundings. She can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognise individuals. She can process speech and have conversations using a natural language subsystem.As of 2018 Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. OpenCog Prime, primarily the work of Hanson Robotics' former chief scientist Ben Goertzel, is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system. Goertzel has described the AI methods that Sophia uses, which include face tracking and emotion recognition, with robotic movements generated by deep neural networks. CNBC has commented on Sophia's "lifelike" skin and her ability to emulate more than 60 facial expressions. Sophia's dialogue is generated via a decision tree, and is uniquely integrated with these outputs. Her speech synthesis ability is provided by CereProc's text-to-speech engine, which also allows her to sing. Sophia is conceptually similar to the computer program ELIZA, which was one of the first attempts at simulating a human conversation. The software has been programmed to give pre-written responses to specific questions or phrases, like a chatbot. These responses are used to create the illusion that the robot is able to understand conversation, including stock answers to questions like "Is the door open or shut?" Sophia's AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows her to improve responses in the future. In 2017 Hanson Robotics announced plans to open Sophia to a cloud environment using a decentralized blockchain marketplace. Around January 2018 Sophia was upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk. In 2019 Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits. A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).
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