I like one of the scenes in Matrix, where Neo is already known as The One after his resurrection, fighting with agents. He looked at them non-chalantly and said, “Hmmm, upgrades.” Well, robots don’t evolve, so they get upgraded, and Professor Hamura from the Nippon Dental University, the man behind the hugely successful Simroid dental training robot that was unveiled in the same year as the iPhone, decided that the time is ripe to roll out an upgraded version of his pet project.
For starters, the new and improved Simroid will feature speech recognition, so should you open your mouth and speak to it, it will actually move in response. You know what I would love to do? I would like to speak to it while moving my dental instruments in its mouth just to get back at all the dentists who have done the same to me over the years. Apart from that, sensors located in and around the mouth will let the robot react accordingly. This latest version is bi-lingual, being able to converse in both English and Japanese.
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