Japan's New Female Humanoid Robots Are Shocking

Japan's New Female Humanoid Robots Are Shocking Somewhere in Osaka, a woman sits in a chair. She blinks. She breathes. When someone walks into the room, her eyes drift toward the door, and she has never been alive for a single second. She is not a film effect and not a mannequin with a speaker inside. She is a machine, built in Japan, and she has been fooling real people for more than a decade. One elderly visitor once walked up to a researcher and asked, "Where is the android?" while she was sitting right beside him. Her creator says a robot like her can pass for human for five to ten seconds. So how close can a Japanese female robot get today to passing for a real woman? And how does she pull it off? Let's start with the woman in that chair, because she is doing all of this while doing nothing at all. What exactly is her trick, and can it survive a real conversation?