has unveiled their first – and it is bound by the same laws as real-life
Women who live there. The country recently unveiled the mechanical woman, named Sarah, this week as part of a matching set of humanoids. However, the pair are coded differently to be culturally aligned with the nation's values, according to the creator. This means that while the male robot, Muhammed, is seemingly able to talk freely, the female doesn't have the same operations. Instead, Sarah was programmed to refuse conversations about or as it is illegal for real-life women to discuss such things under Sharia law. Sara reportedly "knows that she's a girl, she's 25 years old, she's 1.62m [5ft, 3in], she's wearing Saudi clothing," according to Elie Metri, the CEO of the Riyadh-based firm QSS AI & Robots. She wears a traditional abaya, a long-flowing modest dress, and a headscarf-like hijab. The
Robot speaks both English and Arabic and the large language model (LLM) AI that powers her conversational skills doesn't "rely on anyone else's libraries, not even ChatGPT." This means she can detect and understand a variety of different Saudi dialects, according to news site . When addressed with "Hello, Sarah," the springs into action, analysing sentences, and then providing "the appropriate answer" under local law. That definition of appropriate, of course, is uniquely Saudi for QSS's female humanoid. "She should be nice, not talking politics, not talking sex, because we're in
Saudi Arabia," the CEO added. Her male counterpart, however, dons traditional Saudi clothing of a red keffiyeh and long gown, and came under controversy after he appeared to grope a women's bottom at its debut event. However, creators have argued that the movement wasn't sexual and was just the robot being "clumsy". They said: "While humans are speaking, we move hands. We are not mannequins. It's the same for a robot."