Robojase is clearly a sleeper agent of our future robot overloads. They come in all quirky or funny, disarm you in more ways than one, and take over the world. Robojase is the first robot to host a show in the UK so, our future robot overlords are half way there. You have been warned.
Last November 14, the Glee Club in Birmingham, England, was the debut hotspot for Channel 5 tech programme The Gadget Show‘s RoboJase, an android comedian. The metal comic is expected to make it to television for broadcast in December. So, don’t fret if you can’t catch it live.
Modelled on Gadget Show presenter Jason Bradbury, a professional comedian in his own right, ‘RoboJase’ performed a five minute set alongside professional comedians including Michael Legge and Rob Deering. The bill also featured Lee Ridley, the comedian with cerebral palsy who performs with the help of an iPad speech app.
As for how the idea came about: the team behind the Gadget Show were tasked with the idea of replacing themselves with artificial intelligence for a series. So, they came up with RoboJase, a pre-programmed comedic host who has evolved from a talking head into a life-size, eerie doppelgänger of Bradbury.
It is equipped with facial recognition technology so that it determine if its jokes are funny, something called SHORE (Sophisticated High-Speed Object Recognition Engine) technology. In addition, Bradbury has said that he had to talk for 15 hours using a script to provide the fodder for RoboJase’s advanced speech synthesis engine. The results won’t put live comedians out of business, but with an attached AI engine, the android comedian is only expected to get smarter. So, who knows where it will go from here.
