Madrid’s 4M Election News To Be Reported In Real-Time By A Humanoid Robot Called Sophia

Madrid’s 4M Election News To Be Reported In Real-Time By A Humanoid Robot Called Sophia.

The 4M elections for the Community of Madrid promise to be very intense. To keep journalists, and the rest of the country informed, and in keeping with the technological times in which we live, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s Government has decided to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interact with journalists accredited to cover the count on election night and provide answers to questions.

This is the first time an election has used this smart software. It is a digital innovation developed in Hong Kong, China, and is capable of interacting with people and offering data in real-time, thanks to a technology adapted to offer detailed information on voting in an “agile and precise way”, said the Community of Madrid through a Press release.

Today, Tuesday, May 4, 5,112,780 people are being called to the polls in the Community of Madrid to elect the 136 deputies who will make up the Assembly for the next two years.

It will be the pandemic though that marks the elections, as the virus still keeps the region well above what is considered high risk – the incidence rate in the region is 384 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the last 14 days while the danger threshold is 250- the pressure on the hospital system remains high

Sophia’s neural network will be given access to data on participation progress by municipalities, health restrictions or information on voting by mail, and accessible voting so ‘it’ will have every bit of data needed to give an accurate account of how the elections are running.

Its creator, a company called Hanson Robotics, has allowed Madrid to use Sophia for the election day of May 4, adapting the robot software that will be at the service of the media from the Data Center of Pavilion 14 of IFEMA.

There are more than 160 accredited journalists expected to cover the elections and Sophia will interact with them through facial recognition, as she imitates human gestures and facial expressions, and will be able to answer “any question on predefined topics,” the statement said. To do this, it uses speech recognition technology from Alphabet Inc – Google’s parent company – and is designed with the ability to learn.

Sophia’s technology analyses everything she hears so that with the aid of the Internet, she can search for information to “create the best possible response”, allowing journalists to know in real-time the full news coverage and date concerning the elections- thanks to artificial intelligence.

Source: 20minutes