Technology is changing our ways of life. Robby Pepper is Italy's first robot gatekeeper. He can answer questions in Italian, English and German. He is placed at a hotel to help answer simple questions from visitors. A guest from Moldova, congratulated the robot on his skills. "He's like a real person. He's really good." She said. "He talked to me, and he shook my hand."
Japan's Softbank Robotics created Robby. It can provide hotel guests with information they need, like where to find a restaurant and its hours of operation. The use of robots is growing in service industries like tourism. But they are expected to become more useful as better artificial intelligence, or AI, is developed.
The International Federation of Robotics says about 79,000 professional service robots were sold last year. It expects up to 25 percent sales growth each year. There are many different kinds of artificial intelligence machines: learning robots, cleaning robots, medical robots and public relations robots.
We have made some progress in the development of AI, but we still have a long way to go. Experts say people in the United States and Japan seem more welcoming to robots than people in Europe do. Shoppers at a store in Scotland got one robot, Softbank's Fabio Pepper, fired out Customers were not willing to talk to the robot. And a security robot in Washington DC made news last year when it rolled itself into a fountain*and could not get out.
In Brescia, the Cayu car sore is using another Softbank Pepper robot to sell cars Named Cayuiki .the robot is programmed to give information on cars, playing games and collecting information. It is helping to bring in possible car buyers .But the head of the Cayu car store said, "To sell the cars, you still need human beings."
