China's talking robot Jia Jia had a dismal first interview in English where she forgot where the Great Wall of China was. The mechanical marvel has been sent back to humanoid school to hone her skills after stumbling over basic words and phrases during the Skype interview. Jia Jia was unable to respond to basic questions about the number of letters in the alphabet or describe the American journalist she was talking to. Chinese robot Jia Jia (right) was interviewed by Kevin Kelly (left) co-founder of Wired magazine over Skype but the mechanical marvel's conversation was not coherent It took the team three years to complete the robot, which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips and body, yet seems to hold its head in a submissive manner. The humanoid is programmed to recognise human/machine interaction, has autonomous position and navigation and offers services based on cloud technology. This humanoid has natural eye movement, speech that is in sync with its lip movement and refers to its male creators as'lords'.

At a recent conference here of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, robots competed to rescue dummies in a disaster mock-up, while a robot named George greeted attendees as they arrived. Dozens of teenagers -- a next generation of roboticists -- showed off their robot creations in a contest. Presentations by scientists ran from the esoteric ("Online Semantic Extraction by Backpropagation Neural Network with Various Syntactic Structure Representation" by Heidi Yeung of the City University of Hong Kong) to the practical topic du jour ("Intelligent Technology for Adaptive Aging," by the University of Michigan's Martha Pollack).