Meet Sara: Saudi Arabia’s first performing robot who can speak in local dialect

Meet Sarah. Saudi Arabia’s first robot that can communicate in dialects, perform folk dances and answer questions.
Sarah welcomed visitors to the Kingdom’s Digital Pavilion at the LEAP23 conference in Riyadh, state news agency SPA reported on Tuesday.
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A built-in camera uses artificial intelligence to detect when a person is standing in front of the robot. Conversation starts when the visitor greets with the phrase “Hello Sara”. Sara includes pre-trained models that recognize different dialects of the Kingdom, analyze sentences to understand their content, and provide appropriate answers to be sent in text form.
Sarah is one of her LEAP main characters this year. Representatives from companies such as Snap, Aramco and Zoom will host exhibitions at the second edition of the big tech conference in Riyadh.
The LEAP conference kicked off with the announcement from Oracle of her cloud computing services, which pledged her $1.5 billion investment in Saudi Arabia.
Last year’s event saw her invest $6.4 billion in technology for the kingdom as it seeks to modernize its economy.
LEAP will be held from Monday 6th February to Thursday 9th February at the Riyadh Front Expo Centre. Over 720 speakers from 50 countries will participate. Other exhibitors include Google, NEOM, Mastercard, Ericsson and John Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong SAR.
In total he expects over 100,000 people to attend his LEAP. This LEAP is organized by the Kingdom’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) in collaboration with Tahaluf, a strategic joint his venture jointly owned by Informa PLC and the Saudi Federal Cybersecurity and Programming (SAFCSP).
Also featured are some of the biggest names in tech, including rapper will.i.am and soccer player Charles Puyol.