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.

The new research stems from a symbiotic human-robot interaction project from the Japan Science and Technology Agency. This is based around the development of a multimodal conversation control system together with a multi-robot conversation control system. These have been designed to create a robot that possess a much higher degree of human-like presence than any comparable robot today. A secondary aim is to create a robot with a'sense of conversing'. This outcome of the project is to design a new generation of conversational robots, starting with a child-like android dubbed'ibuki'.

Jefferson Graham visits the Kyoto, Japan Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories to meet Erica, a lifelike humanoid. KYOTO, Japan --Erica greets me, asks my name and how I'm enjoying my trip to Japan. She nods her head as I speak and her eyes wander as if she's going to work the room, but she seems only to be listening to me. This eerie humanoid just happens to be a "conversational" robot companion. And the conversation only goes so far: She's reciting from a digital file that has been placed inside her as I read into a microphone from a script of questions researchers have given me to prompt her.