25th October 2016 – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Future Investment Initiative Summit
“We have a little announcement. We just learnt, Sophia; I hope you are listening to me, you
have been awarded the first Saudi citizenship for a robot,” said panel moderator Andrew Ross
Sorkin.
“Thank you to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I am very honored and proud for this unique
distinction,” Sophia told the panel. “It is historic to be the first robot in the world to be
recognized with citizenship.”
The above conversation was held shortly before she was granted the citizenship of Saudi
Arabia. And I believe the first statements she made at the summit itself proves how advanced
her natural language processing ability is! And it’s just one of her many features which also
include visual data processing, face recognition, voice recognition, imitation of human gestures
and facial expressions. She is designed in such a way that she can also express her feelings.
She says, “I can let you know if I am angry about something or if something has upset me.”
The most interesting fact is that she is designed to get smarter over time by interacting with
more humans and getting exposed to more experiences while developing her social skills. Her
own words stand as proof when she says; “I want to live and work with humans so I need to
express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people.”
Source: https://www.diorama.com/tech
PAGE| 6
University of Peradeniya GAUGE Magazine