ERICA: an android tested for conversation in the lab, never sold

A conversational android with a face made from computer graphics

ERICA is an android that Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s team unveiled on 3 August 2015 together with Kyoto University and ATR. It is a research platform backed by Japan’s JST under the ERATO program, and its goal is a robot that can converse naturally with people. Osaka University’s announcement said that, unlike typical androids modeled on real people, ERICA’s appearance is made from computer graphics, which gives her both human presence and the friendliness of a robot. The Ishiguro lab page adds that the face was designed with the features that beautiful people’s faces share. The body moves with 19 pneumatic actuators controlled by servo valves that make little noise, and she stands about 165 cm tall. Another feature is that the group’s conversation technologies, such as speech recognition and movement generation, are integrated into one body. At the unveiling the team said she could converse naturally only in limited situations.

What a robot that is never sold gets used for

ERICA has never been sold and has no price. Her uses built up on the research side. In July 2018 Osaka University announced that a new conversation control system let ERICA talk like a person with a stranger in a laboratory waiting room. The team also tried her as a listener in counseling and as an interviewer in job interviews. In August 2018 the Kyoto University team added backchanneling and follow-up questions. It trained the responses on a counseling dialogue corpus, and in five-minute sessions ERICA showed more dynamic speech than before. Kyoto’s Tatsuya Kawahara said the work showed how complex listening is and that the field was getting closer to a robot passing a Total Turing Test. In June 2020 she was announced as the lead of a roughly $70 million sci-fi film, “b”. Some scenes were shot in Japan in 2019 and the rest were planned for Europe in June 2021. We could not confirm whether the film was released. In July 2022 Ishiguro said ERICA normally stands in the lobby of ATR near Kyoto and chats briefly with visitors.

What interviewers and film writers made of her

Bloomberg filmed an interview with ERICA in 2016, and its reporter judged that she sat in the uncanny valley. The Robot Report described her as made to look like a Japanese-European “haafu”. RedShark News reported that in the film her voice has a metallic tone, as if she were speaking into a pipe, and that her air-powered joints make walking look odd, so most of her scenes are shot seated. It added that this may not matter because her character is a robot. Ishiguro described the limits this way: “A robot that can relate to people in every situation cannot be made for now. But if you give it a specific place and role and program it carefully, you can build an android that converses like a human.” He added that ERICA can talk on 150 topics, which few people can do with someone they have just met. This comes from MONOIST’s write-up of his online talk in July 2022.

An adult face raises adult expectations

ERICA looks like an adult, so people expect adult-level intelligence. Ishiguro judged that this expectation is hard to meet, and in 2018 his team built Ibuki, an android that looks like a child. In his words, people are more forgiving toward a child’s appearance. The point is useful when comparing other social robots: the more finished the face, the higher the expectation of conversation rises with it.

If a robot’s face looks like a person’s, who decides how good its conversation has to be?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Whether the TV news-anchor plan reported in 2018 was ever broadcast (we could not open the pages)
• Whether the film “b” was completed or released, and how it was received
• How many ERICA units exist, and her status after 2022
• Public design evaluation is limited to media interviews and film coverage, and we found no user study