OSAKA – Sharp Corp. on Thursday began selling a humanoid robot phone armed with artificial intelligence features and carrying a price tag of ¥213,840 (about $2,000). The electronics maker is producing 5,000 units of the product, called RoBoHoN, per month. The launch of the phone is part of efforts to develop next-generation home appliances under Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which recently took over Sharp. Sharp says the two-legged robot phone, about 19.5 cm tall and weighing 390 grams, can have conversations with users using artificial intelligence, besides having basic mobile phone functions such as a voice service and camera. The RoBoHoN learns users' preferences and behavioral patterns through dialogue, Sharp said, adding the device can also walk and dance, controlled mainly by voice.

SoftBank Corp. said Wednesday its Pepper humanoid robots will staff a cellphone store in Tokyo for a week this spring. The firm said the static, talking machines will run the store from March 28 to April 3 in the city's upscale Omotesando shopping district. SoftBank already operates a separate store in the neighborhood. "I don't know how this will turn out, but it should be a quite interesting experiment," said SoftBank CEO Ken Miyauchi during a two-day exhibition called Pepper World. The telecoms giant said it will deploy five to six Peppers at the shop.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing thanks to a machine learning process called "deep learning," raising expectations of radical changes and greater convenience in people's lives. The AI boom began early in the 2010s when major information technology companies such as U.S. companies Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. established research institutes, and the development of deep learning has added fuel to the fire. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning in which a computer system mimics human neural circuits and processes information in multiple processing layers. It is a "revolution" in the foundation of AI, said Yutaka Matsuo, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and expert on information technology and AI. The AI in a computer system teaches itself by processing huge amounts of data. When, for example, AI processes input data and outputs them, it repeatedly learns the features of the data so as to bring out the same data as those entered.

SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives are pouring $1 billion into a nonprofit aimed at creating artificial intelligence that augments humans' capabilities, rather than making them obsolete. The effort announced Friday, called OpenAI, joins significant investments from companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which have used artificial intelligence to sharpen their businesses with services such as facial recognition or language processing. But the OpenAI founders suggested they have set their sights on bigger problems. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," a blog post on Open-AI's website (bit.ly/1lBMdz9) said.

WASHINGTON – For artificial intelligence and smart machines to really take off, computers are going to have to be able to think more like people, according to experts in the field who are making important progress toward that goal. Scientists on Thursday said they had created a computer model, or algorithm, that captures the unique human ability to grasp new concepts from a single example in a study involving learning unfamiliar handwritten alphabet characters. This and similar research has the twin goals of better understanding human learning and developing new, more human-like learning algorithms, New York University cognitive and data scientist Brenden Lake said. "We aimed to reverse-engineer how people learn about these simple visual concepts, in terms of identifying the types of computations that the mind may be performing, and testing these assumptions by trying to recreate the behavior," Lake said. The algorithm was designed to make a computer able to learn quickly from a single example in the way people do.

PALO ALTO – Google has a lot of computers. By many accounts, it has more computers than any other company in the world. Yet even with so much horsepower at their disposal, Google's researchers keep running into barriers when trying to solve certain complex problems, particularly those tied to artificial intelligence. Google, in effect, has been stumped. "We have already encountered problems we would like to solve that are unfeasible with conventional computers," John Giannandrea, a vice president for engineering at Google, said during a new conference on Tuesday. "We want to understand the future that may lie ahead of us in nonconventional computing."

Honda said Wednesday it would put a commercialized self-driving car on the road by 2020, challenging rivals Toyota and Nissan which are also betting on the future of autonomous vehicles. The announcement, ahead of the Tokyo Motor Show next week, comes as the auto giants step on the accelerator in a bid to race past overseas competitors on the next-generation technology. Google has been testing self-driving cars in Silicon Valley, as have U.S.-based Tesla and General Motors, while Nissan has vowed to put an automated car on Japan's highways as soon as 2016. Earlier this month, Toyota unveiled a vehicle that can drive itself along a highway, with plans for a 2020 rollout. The car, a modified Lexus GS, uses sophisticated sensors to navigate roads, merge with traffic and overtake other vehicles.

Sharp Corp. has introduced a new mobile phone combined with a humanoid robot. The RoBoHoN robot phone, which stands 19 cm tall and weighs about 390 grams, will make its commercial debut in the first half of 2016, the Osaka-based firm said during a preview event Tuesday at CEATEC, Japan's biggest IT and electronics trade show, that will kick off Wednesday at Makuhari Messe in the city of Chiba. From the front, the device looks just like a toy humanoid robot, but its back sports a 2-inch touch screen. This panel works just like a smartphone screen, enabling users to browse the Internet and make phone calls. Sharp said the idea for the RoBoHoN emerged out of contemplating what would be the next evolution for mobile phones.

Japan is set to accelerate its development of robots to secure a lead over rival nations, including the United States and Germany, as a new industrial revolution beckons. The world is "on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution, a paradigm shift caused by robotics and artificial intelligence," said Takuro Morinaga, a professor at Dokkyo University. "A country that has a hold on the revolution will control the world." The first industrial revolution was propelled by steam engines, the second by electric power and the third by computers. There was considerable anticipation for the field at a symposium on the future of robotics, held in June at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center and attended by more than 1,000 people.

Hideo Sawada, who runs the hotel as part of the Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, insists using robots is not a gimmick but a serious effort to utilize technology and achieve efficiency. The receptionist robot that speaks in English is a vicious-looking dinosaur, and the one that speaks Japanese is a female humanoid with blinking lashes. "If you want to check in, push one," the dinosaur says. The visitor still has to punch a button on the desk, and type in information on a touch panel screen. Henn na Hotel, as it is named in Japanese, was shown to reporters Wednesday, complete with robot demonstrations, ahead of its opening to the public Friday.