A robot named Erica is due to become an on-air news anchor in Japan. Erica is a lifelike android created by Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University and a prominent figure in the robotics world. Much like today’s flesh-and-blood newsreaders, Erica, designed to look like a 23-year-old Japanese woman, will recite scripts on-air while sitting behind a news desk, equipped with speech recognition and armed with speech generation algorithms, enabling it to have live exchanges with humans.
