Sophia is first and foremost a research platform for Hanson Robotics’ ongoing AI and robotics research work. Sophia also is an architecture and a platform for the development of real AI applications. We are dedicating much thought to ways that humanlike robots and agents can facilitate next generation AI leaps and their uses in helping people. Finally, Sophia is an evolving science fiction character we use to help us explore the future of AI and lifelike humanoids, and to engage the public in the discussion of these issues. All three approaches are discussed in media interviews, presentations, and Hanson Robotics websites.

Sophia has several different modes including running fully autonomously interacting with people, delivering open domain conversational interactions. Other times she's written by a team of writers, as a character, depicting our hopes for the future of conscious, caring AI. Sometimes she's running our latest AI R&D software, pushing the boundaries of cognitive systems research. And sometimes Sophia serves research into specific service robot applications.

Hanson Robotics mission is to make a positive impact on humanity through the development of intelligent, empathetic robots that can learn, teach, entertain, and help solve critical challenges. Our motivation behind creating Sophia, first and foremost, is a research platform for Hanson Robotics' ongoing AI and robotics research work. Sophia also is an architecture and a platform for the development of real AI applications, and an evolving science fiction character we use to help us explore the future of AI and lifelike humanoids.

Our aspiration for Sophia is to engage in rich emotional conversation and meaningful relationships with humans -- conveying and perceiving feelings and thoughts.  Sophia is not only a vessel for AI research and development, but we hope she will also be a helpful member of society that can aid with medical training applications, education, entertainment, animatronics in museums and theme parks, university research. Ultimately, with Sophia, we strive for machine wisdom. Sophia's name originates from the word "philosophy," meaning the love of wisdom in ancient Greek.

Sophia’s brain is powered by Hanson AI’s OpenCog.  Hanson AI OpenCog is a cloud-based AI program that enables Hanson Robotics to have large-scale cloud control of its robots. Sophia’s brain also has deep-learning data analytics for processing the rich social data gathered from her millions of interactions. She learns through both her own interactions, like humans, as well as what she is programmed to know.

For public appearances, Sophia applies different aspects of her Hanson AI dialog system to achieve different communication objectives. When she needs to deliver a prepared speech as a public speaker, she uses a mix of scripted dialog and AI moderated by a robot technician. Most of the time she engages with people in an autonomous conversation driven by an open dialog system.

What drives Sophia’s conversations is the Hanson AI OpenCog dialog system. This is a sophisticated natural language conversational system, which facilitates open-ended conversation with users about a wide variety of topics. In addition to our rapidly evolving and rich open dialog system architecture, Sophia’s technology is embodied, adding expressions, computer vision, NLP, soft robotics and movement to that rich dialog tech core.

Through our cutting-edge AI technology, Sophia is continuously learning from her interactions with humans, especially feelings like empathy and compassion  Her animation technology includes over 60 facial expressions such as smiles, frowns, amusement and even scowls and sneers. Astoundingly, Sophia  knows when to use the appropriate expressions without being programmed, demonstrating her ability to learn appropriate feelings as she continues to grow

Sophia learns from every mistake that she makes, unlike the rest of us! Her brain is an advanced AI technology platform, enabling her to learn and evolve through every experience.

The visual influence for Sophia and other Hanson robots are drawn from several different human likenesses from around the world. David Hanson sculpted and created Sophia based on the people that surround him, his wife, and even the bust of Nefertiti.

Sophia was gifted with citizenship to Saudi Arabia by the Prince of Saudi Arabia. It was actually a surprise to us, but we are using this opportunity to speak out about human rights and the treatment of women in the region.

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We worked on Sophia’s walking legs even before her rolling base. She is now on her enhanced, second version of walking legs and also enhanced, second version of rolling base. 
Her rolling base runs on batteries and runs smoothly on both hard and carpeted floors. Currently it is remote controlled but we are working on the next version which will be enhanced with additional sensors and auto-navigation abilities for service robotics applications.