From the Independent

Robot conducts first electronic wedding

By Enjoli Liston
Monday, 17 May 2010




Flashing eyes, plastic pigtails and a tinny voice are not necessarily what a bride and groom look for in their wedding master of ceremonies, unless they work in Japan's robotic industry.

Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue tied the knot yesterday under the watchful eye of a 1.5m android known as I-Fairy, in what the machine's manufacturer, Kokoro, said was the first robot-led wedding in the world.

Wires led from the bottom of the robot, bolted to a chair in front of 50 guests at a rooftop restaurant in central Tokyo, to a black curtain a few metres away behind which a man crouched, using a computer to operate the electronic wedding conductor's movement and utterances.

The robot, wearing a wreath of bright flowers and speaking in a tinny voice, waved its arms as it asked the groom to "Please lift the bride's veil", before inviting the newly-weds to kiss.

The happy couple chose this unique angle to their nuptials because they were keen to showcase an example of the new generation of androids. "This was a lot of fun," Satoko Inoue, the 36-year-old bride who works at Kokoro, told the Associated Press. "I think that Japanese have a strong sense that robots are our friends. Those in the robot industry mostly understand this, but people mainly want robots near them that serve some purpose."

Her new husband, 42-year-old Tomohiro Shibata, a professor of robotics at the Japanese Nara Institute of Science and Technology was a little more critical of the feminine android. "It would be nice if the robot was a bit more clever, but she is very good at expressing herself," he said. Japanese manufacturers are increasingly trying to inject robots into everyday life. The University of Tokyo has already developed two baseball-playing robots, Honda has created a child-like android, and a robotic grocery-packer was unveiled in Kyoto last year.

Kokoro, the Japanese firm which manufactures the I-Fairy, also produces humanoid robots which can laugh and smile, products which it hopes will "touch the hearts of the people". The I-Fairy is only one of three in the world and retailing at around 6.3 million yen (£47,000), it may be a while yet before it joins cake and confetti as a regular wedding fixture.

A tape recorder would have been cheaper.

When I first read the title of this article, I wrongly assumed that two robots had finally decided to tie the knots under the watchful eyes of a bunch of humans, but alas, it wasn't to be.

The Japanese seem to be much stronger believers in a high-tech future than most of us Westerners are.

Japan is a society where the population is shrinking by 0.19% annually and where the fertility rate (children per adult female) at 1.21% is far below population replacement level of 2.1%.

At the same time, Japanese are unenthusiastic about admitting immigrants from more prolifically breeding countries, such as Indonesia or Philippines, to provide services for an increasingly ageing population (with the world's third highest life expectancy at birth, of 82.12 years). For comparison, expectancy in the UK is 79.01 years, in the US, 78.11.

So if Japanese breeding habits doom the nation to eventual extermination and they don't want foreigners to come in to care for their increasingly large proportion of geriatric citizens, robots must be the answer.