Japanese Company to Rent Hello Kitty Robo and Ifbot | RobotShop Community

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PeopleStaff, an employment agency in Japanese, is adding robots to its usual roster of people. PeopleStaff is recommending companies recruit Hello Kitty Robo and Ifbot. The positions are receptionists and hospital care, respectively. One wonders if the company is also considering a name change.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/blog/show/japanese-company-to-rent-hello-kitty-robo-and-ifbot
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I had a chance to chat with the Hello Kitty Robo on video recently- http://www.robots-dreams.com/2005/11/hello_kitty_rob.html and it’s pretty clear that the PeopleStaff announcement is purely a publicity stunt. Both the Hello Kitty robot and Ifbot are a long, long way from anything that could be put to practical use.

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Thank you for the link. Oh, if I could only understand Japanese. Perhaps I can take a course.

You are likely right about it being a publicity stunt. Still, there is prior art. Carnegie Mellon University has been running a chat-bot as a receptionist for some time now.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~marekm/news/valeriepress.html

Like those pesky computer answering services, I suppose it is just as much about lowering our expectations as it is about raising their technology.