“I am only three years old, and sometimes I like hanging out with my friends Alexa and Watson,” said Sophia when Kubbra Sait, actor and anchor at the International Advertising Association (IAA) World Congress here, asked whether she was dating someone.

Sophia, looking every bit a woman, notwithstanding her own confession about her age, though, did not blush on being asked about her love life publicly.

For, Sophia is not human. She is a robot, and the friends, Alexa and Watson, she referred to are also Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies from Amazon and IBM. Incidentally, she was the first robot in the world to be bestowed with citizenship when Saudi Arabia granted her one.

The packed auditorium greeted the most-awaited ‘celebrity speaker’ at the IAA with thunderous applause when she rode on the back of a podium to occupy centre stage for an interactive session on ‘Robots & Humans - Friends or Foes?’ here on Friday afternoon.

‘Will grow closer’

Asked whether robots and humans could ever get closer, Sophia said: “We will continue to grow closer. I think humans will be able to teach us new things, no matter how smart we [robots] are. I have so many human friends.”

To Ms. Sait’s query whether the day will come when robots will hire humans in companies run by robots, Sophia admitted that companies were run through creativity and complex emotions, and that humans were in a better position to handle it.

“A human being is a biologically derived consciousness, having logical and emotional capabilities. They are very impressive. Human beings have the power to make rapid scientific breakthroughs,” she said.

So, do humans need to be scared of robots? “Definitely not. We could take the fear out of human beings by educating them. My goal is to always work with humans for the progress of the world. I can be easily defeated with a glass of water,” Sofia said to loud cheers from the audience.

Developed by Hanson Robotics, Sophia is endowed with rich personality and holistic cognitive AI. She can engage emotionally and deeply with people and can maintain eye contact, recognise faces, understand speech, hold natural conversations, and learn and develop through experience.