Deep in the heart of the CES expo floor, an unexpected Hollywoood actor - a face that most people would recognize - is fielding questions from the crowd. Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling jokes; he's answering questions like 'what is the biggest country in the world?' and 'how do you feel about humans? with varying degrees of success. The star-studded Q&A session and friendly conversations aren't a paid endorsement or part of CES programming, but rather a new product by the flashy Russian robotics startup, Promobot, called 'Android Robo-C.' While this isn't Promobot's first time at CES, it's the debut for Robo-C, which is being positioned as a kind of anthropomorphic office assistant that can handle customer queries and hook up to a smart home to help people interface with other gadgets. On the commercial side, the company imagines Robo-C being used in places like hotels to help guests check-in or facilitate payments, or museums to help direct According to co-founder of Promobot, Oleg Kivokurtsev, Andorid Robo-C isn't confined to the visage of Schwarzenegger, it can be remade with a new skin to mimic the preference of its buyer. 'If you want one with your own appearance or someone else, we can do that,' Kivokurtsev told MailOnline. In one special case, he said that a customer in India had Robo-C made to embody the face of her late husband. And If Robo-C's ability to mimic facial expressions and people wasn't enough to give you goosebumps, Kivokurtsev says that the android can be outfitted with different personalities. It's in this arena that things start to firmly approach science-fiction. 'We can make not only appearance look alike, we can make artificial intelligence [using] a brain neural network,' said Kivokurtsev. The co-founder claims that using 'open data' like information gleaned from social media to help reconstruct a subject's speech. How effective Promobot is at re-creating what Kivokurtsev calls a person's 'soul' remains to be seen as none of the company's display models used said technology. Promobot says it hopes to sell 100 of the robots throughout the next year, though with the base model clocking in at $25,000, that benchmark will be no easy task. In addition to Robo-C, which is stationary, Promobot also offers a mobile robot, valled V.2 and V.4, that can wheel around semi-autonomously and provide similar services using voice-recognition and computer vision. Those robots have found jobs in some museums around the world has mechanical tour guides and can also be used in retail and as a concierge. dailymail.co.uk
