Mitri, the receptionist at Smartworks, a co-working space in Cessna Business Park on the Outer Ring Road of Bengaluru, wearing pink and white welcomes the people with a fixed smile and answers questions with patients about the facility.
She is also ready to take over some janitorial work, vacuum floors and play the role of the security guard at night in the building. The male counterpart of Mitri, Mitra, is in training, by contrast, to be established at a car dealership.
Both robots Mitra and Mitra were similar in every way except their genders as integrated by plastic outer shells.
The emerge of the robots is already enhancing the infrastructure of the workplace, yet somethings remain familiar upsettingly -such as integrating robots which manifest the old stereotypes of ‘authoritative’ men and ‘helpful’ women. It is not a coincidence about three of the largest innovative virtual assistance today – Siri, Alexa, and Cortana also portray women like gestures.
The CEO of the Invento Robotics, Balaji Viswanathan explained, “Initially, the robot was gender neutral ”, like the manufactured Mitra and Mitri by Bengaluru company.
Invento Robotics CEO Viswanathan told Invento began about two and a half years ago with the concept for building a human resembling assistant and emerged a design based interactive robot to communicate with people.
This included a “leader” which would turn to stare at people through mounted cameras, a display integrated into its torso which would be easy to arrive and type on and a wheeled base for easy movement. Though it did not include any kind of gender-indicating feature.
