Human-level artificial intelligence needs a human-like artificial body. That’s a good reason for Engineered Arts, a British company known for designing and manufacturing humanoid robots, to develop Ameca, which is not only a humanoid robot but also a platform for developing future robotic technologies focused on human-robot interaction.

Ameca has received a lot of attention since its first appearance in 2021 because of its ability to express different types of emotions. With 17 motors in its face, Ameca has showed the ability to imitate disgust, disbelief, disgust, pain, surprise and regret. Then it was provided with GPT-3 to be able to speak different languages and Stable Diffusion to be able to draw.

Ameca's appearance features gray rubber skin on the face and hands, and is designed to appear genderless. Its skin has contributed to its popularity and acceptance because that makes it look like robots in the I, Robot movie rather than trying to appear human like its predecessor Mesmer.

How Ameca Express?

Ameca is built from 3D scans of real people which allows it to imitate the human structure. There are 17 motors in Ameca’s face, which control the movement of its eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, mouth, and jaw allowing it to make a wide range of facial expressions like happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and surprise .

Using its eye and chest cameras and an artificial intelligent facial recognition system, it can recognize the facial expressions of the people in front of it and mimic the emotions they express. It requires more training to express its own emotions when talking to people.

How Ameca Speaks?

In April 2023, Ameca was upgraded to use GPT-4 to interact with users. It uses a speech-to-text system to convert user speech into text, passes it to GPT-4, gets the results and then speaks using a text-to-speech system.

Ameca can speak many languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. However, Ameca's speech is not perfect, and it can sometimes make mistakes just like ChatGPT.

How Ameca Draws?

Ameca has 12 motors in each arm and hand. These motors allow it to move its arms and hands with great precision. In June 2023, Engineered Arts equipped Ameca with Stable Diffusion, an AI model released by Stability AI in August 2022 which converts text into image, to make it capable of drawing. After generating the image, another system works to detect lines and curves that Ameca can draw in a way that makes it entertaining to watch.

Ameca's ability to draw is still under development, and at the moment it has shown the ability to draw some sketchy pictures for a cat and a person.

Can Ameca walk?

Not yet. Walking is a difficult task for a robot, there are many hurdles to overcome before Ameca can walk. However, Ameca is a modular robot, Engineered Arts plans on upgrading its abilities over time so one day Ameca will walk.

Ameca is an impressive humanoid robot that has the potential to change the way we interact with technology. It is still early days, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way we live and work.