Saudi Arabia unveils female humanoid robot programmed not to talk about sex or politics because it is illegal under Sharia law – weeks after the country’s male robot groped a woman

Saudi Arabia now has a matching pair of male and female humanoid robots whose AI is coded to be culturally aligned with the country’s values.

Just weeks after the male robot, Muhammed, groped a woman’s buttocks at its debut event, its creator has revealed that a female version, Sarah, was programmed to reject conversations about sex or politics.

Openly discussing either topic is illegal for real Saudi women under Sharia law.

Sara “knows she is a girl, she is 25 years old, she is 1.62 meters tall and she wears Saudi clothes,” said the CEO of Riyadh-based company QSS AI & Robots.

CEO Elie Metri said Sara’s counterpart Muhammed had simply been clumsy, an all-too-human trait up close.

“While people are talking, we are moving our hands,” Metri said. ‘We are not mannequins. The same goes for a robot.’

Like Mohammed, who is dressed in traditional Saudi clothing consisting of a red keffiyeh and a long dress, Sara wears a traditional abaya, a loose, modest dress and a headscarf-like hijab – both symbols of Islamic piety in the oil-rich Central East. nation.

Metri boasted that Sara speaks both English and Arabic and that the Large Language Model (LLM) AI that powers her conversation skills “doesn’t rely on anyone else’s libraries, not even ChatGPT.”

This unique approach, according to news site Asharq Al-Awsatmeans that Sara can detect and understand a variety of different Saudi dialects.

When addressed by “Hello, Sara,” the AI ​​springs into action, analyzing sentences and then, as the site puts it, providing “the correct answer.”

That definition of appropriate is, of course, uniquely Saudi for the female humanoid of QSS.

“She should be nice, not talk about politics, not talk about sex,” Metri said Business insider‘because we are in Saudi Arabia.’

While the two humanoid bots may be the product of domestic Saudi parts and engineering labor – and carry the country’s ‘Saudi Made’ brand – both were manufactured and programmed in collaboration with Belgian company Zorabotics.

The European tech company’s handiwork can also be seen in the small 23-inch. Nao V6 bipedal robotdesigned as ‘a programmable personal teaching assistant’.

Tommy Deblieck, the co-CEO of Zorarobotics, told reporters that the goal for both Sara and Muhammed is to make them compatible with a wide range of smart sensors, wearables and other third-party ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) devices on the market. .

By communicating with humans through a system of microphones, cameras and their AI chatbot skills, both of QSS’s gendered humanoid robots could then act as a person’s point of contact with a range of smart devices in their real lives, similar to a traditional concierge or personal assistant.

“This QSS project is not finished yet,” Deblieck said Robotics and automation news.

“In the next phase, ‘Sara’ will be connected to IoT, allowing her to connect and control millions of smart devices from more than 2,000 global brands.”

That effort includes Sara’s ability to speak a third language: the so-called MQTT standards-based messaging protocol, which allows machines to talk to machines efficiently while using only limited bandwidth.

The Flemish executive also teased that its QSS partners in Riyadh plan to “develop a Saudi virtual world in which ‘Sara’ plays a central role,” likely linked to the country’s flagship “city of the future” project, NEOM: The site of an audacious , an underground luxury skyscraper, the world’s largest skypool, also known as an ‘exalted heaven’, and perhaps one day robotic servants, such as Sara and Muhammed, as part of the futuristic amenities.

Sara was first unveiled at the LEAP/DeepFest 2023 event in Saudi Arabia in February last year.

Muhammed debuted in March as part of LEAP/DeepFest 2024, where his controversial apparent butt slap was captured on video.

Despite some attempts to modernize in recent years, Saudi Arabia’s legal system is still based on religious Sharia law, derived from the centuries-old teachings of Islam.

The results can often be brutal, especially when it comes to Sharia’s adoption of the death penalty. This year, in less than three months in 2024, 29 people have already been executed. At least seven of this year’s executions were beheadings.

Women are particularly affected by the strict gender-based justice system, which can punish them for participating in political activism or discussing sex in public.

Samara Iqbal, a lawyer from Manchester-based Aramas International Lawyers, told Mail Online in January that she has started warning women tempted by the marriage proposals of Middle Eastern royalty and aristocrats.

Iqbal’s company has opened new offices in Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to accommodate the influx of new cases.

“I see so many girls saying they’re going abroad with a rich prince, thinking nothing can go wrong now,” she told Mail Online. ‘More and more British women are doing that.’

“But if he suddenly wants to cut her off, he can do that (…) he can literally throw her out on the street.”

‘We’re seeing more and more people who have gotten married and moved to the Middle East thinking they’ve been given a luxurious lifestyle, but that only lasts so long – and the courts will turn against her.’

Metri may have been aware of Saudi Arabia’s reputation in the West, noting that his company’s Muhammed robot was merely gesticulating while talking when the bot looked like it was touching the back of Al Arabiya news reporter Rawya Kassem. channel in Dubai.

Kassem, he said, simply got too close to the lightly bearded Saudi humanoid.

“Sexual violence is completely different from a robot hand touching a lady’s coat,” he explained, although his QSS staff said Metro Great Britainwarned other attendees about this ‘Keep a safe distance from the robot during the demonstration.’