Jia Jia robot

Jia Jia is a humanoid robot developed by a team at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, China. She is the product of 3 years of work by a team composed of roboticists led by director Chen Xiaoping. She is not just any old robot; in fact, her creators claim—and it’s hard to disagree—that she’s one of the most lifelike robot models ever made. They go so far as to refer to as a “goddess.” Jia Jia’s face, which is made out of plastic, is so realistic that—if you happened to come upon her and, for a moment, mistook for a human-no one would hold it against you. She has long brown hair, red tones in her skin, bright pink lips, and she wears a stylish red and gold dress. With all of these elements coupled together, she definitely has a humanoid form. She does not look like your traditional image of the silvery, shiny robot that is woven throughout sci-movies and literature. On the contrary, she looks like a real-life young Chinese woman.

Aside from her realistic face, Jia Jia is also remarkable because, to some degree, her facial expressions even resemble those of humans. She can form micro-expressions, which are very brief expressions that people show when they’re thinking a certain thought. Micro-expressions fade after a few moments. Furthermore, Jia Jia’s eyeballs mimic the natural movement of human eyes; they flicker around when you interact with her. Her speech is also in sync with her lip movements. She can move her whole body. As you watch her, you can watch her position herself independently—she moves her hands, for example—squint her eyeballs, and move her head. She can hold conversations with humans, and react to what they tell her. This is not the case for most robots produced nowadays; Jia Jia is an exception in that regard. (And, among those who can talk, it’s pretty rare to find one that looks quite so realistic.) Jia Jia can also take orders from the iCloud, Apple’s cloud-based service.

However, so far, Jia Jia has limited motions; once you watch her move, there’s no mistaking her for a human. Her hands also do not resemble real-life human hands; one publication even compared them to hands of mannequins at department stores. Jia Jia cannot yet laugh or cry; her creators say that these features are still under development. They also plan to give her software so that she can recognize facial expressions. With these features, they say, she’ll be able to interact with people on a deeper, more personal level. They say they plan on programming her further so that she develops deep learning abilities. “Deep learning” refers to a branch of learning by machines in which they use a complex, multi-layered processing structure to understand and interact with the world. We are still beginning to touch on deep learning; it is likely that this technology will undergo tremendous improvements in the coming years. We can only imagine how these kinds of deep learning advancements will reflect on Jia Jia.

Although she can speak quite well—a bilingual robot, Jia Jia is fluent in both English and Mandarin Chinese—Jia Jia’s voice remains mechanical and stilted. At the unveiling, she welcomed everyone personally. “Hello everyone, I’m Jia Jia. Welcome!” she said. When asked to wave her hand, she obligingly did so. During the presentation, she even made a joke, telling the photographers not take pictures of her from a certain angle, as she didn’t want her face to appear fat. She also referred to Xiaoping as “my lord”, although, admittedly, it’s not clear if this was a joke or just a regular part of her programming.

So far, her team has no plans of mass-producing this kind of robot; for now, Jia Jia is unique. As stated, they hope to continue working over her design and adding new features. They have previously developed another robot, Kejia; Kejia, an intelligent service robot who can understand human speech quite well.