Glas discusses how ERICA was designed, the uncanny valley, the software architecture of ERICA, and some of the research studies that ERICA has been involved in. Dylan Glas is a Senior Robotics Software Architect at Futurewei Technologies, a research division of Huawei in Silicon Valley. He was previously a senior researcher in social robotics at Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories at ATR and a Guest Associate Professor at the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. He was the chief architect for the ERICA android in the ERATO Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction Project. His research interests include social human-machine interaction, ubiquitous sensing, network robot systems, teleoperation for social robots, and machine learning.

Erica, who has a beautiful face and speaks with a synthesised voice, is one of the most advanced and autonomous androids in the world. The human-like robot was created in Japan in 2014 and was developed to be capable of conversational interaction. Since then, a total of four models have been engineered. She is unable to walk, but, in the summer of 2017, Erica (short for Erato Intelligent Conversational Android) was given an upgrade so she could move her arms, along with her head, neck and shoulders. If a robot acts as though it has a particular emotion or acts in a particular way to something, we ascribe the sense of it as feeling.