Aiko is very smart and does any chore without complaining

Dec 11, 2008 09:41 GMT  ·  By

Admit it, how many times have you thought about having a perfect wife, who would read the latest headlines in a newspaper, be the perfect maid, help you with cleaning the house, cooking the dinner and the like, do your accounts, look great and never ever complain? Le Trung, a chemist graduate from York University in Canada and a computer and robotics passionate, has been working for a couple of years to make your (and his) dream come true.

The resulting female robot, by the name of Aiko ("Ai" meaning love and "ko" – child) is very beautiful and smart. Trung, 33, has spent a lot of money from his own funds (actually, he even had to sell his car and get bank loans) to get his part of the job done. Her body, which cost $25,000 to build, has been made of silicon and materials from a Japanese doll company in about three months and imitates the human one very accurately.

 

Aiko looks like a model and has the perfect proportions (32-23-33 in inches or 82-59-82 in centimeters), although she weighs only 30 kilograms and is just 151-centimeter tall. She can even react to pain-causing factors and learn what causes pain along the way and can recognize voices, faces, motion, and objects. She is also able to solve math problems that she "sees" and get simple data from her immediate environment, using Le Trung's continuously updated BRAINS (Biometric Robot Artificial Intelligence Neural System) software. She can say some 13,000 sentences in English and in Japanese.

 

Aiko learned what Le Trung's favorite drink is and prepares it for him each morning, and as he drinks it, she reads the latest headlines for him. In the evening, they have dinner together, although her reduced appetite only means more food for him. Her cooking skills are also far better than average; she also cleans the house a lot. The Sun quotes the inventor as saying that the public reacts differently when they go out, “Women usually try to talk to her. But men always want to touch her, and if they do it the wrong way she slaps them”. Le Trung hopes to get new funding in order to complete Aiko with the ability to walk as a human.

 

This shows how far the robot maker's plans have strayed from the initial ones, when he only wanted to create a machine that would help the elderly. But we don't mind. Oh, and have we mentioned that she never complains?