"Sophie" The AI That Looks Back At You
Key facts up front: Sophie is not a physical humanoid robot. She is an experimental AI "agent" that Google Labs has been testing inside its Mountain View Beam Lab , rendered life-sized through Google Beam telepresence hardware . She has not launched commercially, and Google has not published pricing or a release date for Sophie-style agents. By Mr Khayyam Raza The AI That Looks Back At You Walk into a small demo room in Mountain View, sit down across from an 8K, human-scale 3D display, and a woman appears to be sitting across the table from you. She makes eye contact. She notices when you lean forward. She asks what you'd like to talk about. Then you realize: there's no camera on her end, because there's no "her" ... only a rendering, reacting to you in real time. That's the experience a handful of journalists have now had with Sophie, an experimental AI agent Google has been quietly developing inside its Beam Lab. Before going further, it...