 Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit. I'm now delighted to be joined by Professor Cindy Bethel and by TheraBot. TheraBot actually means therapy bot. The reason why is because this is a therapeutic robot. Yes. You're at Mississippi State University. Tell me, what's the idea behind this? People have become very used to using animals for support and comfort. Not everybody can have a live dog. We developed TheraBot to help provide support and comfort to people going through traumatic times or having mental health issues to help them through challenging times. First of all, is there a market for this and has it worked? Well, we're still in the prototyping phase, so we haven't actually tried to sell TheraBot yet. But yes, we found that there is a market. There's been a lot of interest in something like this because there's situations where people can't have live dogs. You can't take them into some hospitals in situations. People have asthma, people have allergies. They can't physically take care of a dog. So, there is a need for something like this. And coming to the summit here, what does it bring for you? It gives me an opportunity to interact with other people who have AI for good as a goal or a passion in their lives, which is something that has been a passion for me, is that I want to create technologies that make a positive impact on the world and make a difference in the quality of lives. And so, this allows me to connect with other people who have a similar mindset. And so, we can communicate and talk about AI and how we can do things in a good way. What's been the reaction from people you've been? I've been seeing you out with therapy, Therapot, for this dog. What have people been saying to you? They've been really excited about it. Everybody has kind of voted it the cutest robot. So, I think people have responded very well to it and they've asked really good questions when they've come up to our table where we have it displayed and the questions that have been in the different presentations that we've done have been good. There are ethical concerns as well. How do you address those? What are the ethical concerns? We want to make sure that we're always doing things in the right way so that we're not causing harm to people. And I think that's super important to do. So we want to make sure that we're ensuring that the hardware and the software work well, that we are doing things in a way that's responsible and that we always have what's best for people in mind when we're developing our technologies. I know that live animals, because I've done some reporting on it, like the dogs have been used in courts for people who have been victims of sex abuse, Labrador's, no cats or beds in hospitals, but they're the real thing. So are people going to develop an emotional bond with a robot? Actually there's been a lot of research that has shown that people will develop a similar type bond to a robot as they will other things that are moving and it's because it moves. And once it moves, then people start developing an attachment to it. And so we've had incidences even of soldiers who have bonded with their robots in the field during battlefields. And so I don't think that will be any issue. And I've had people who have already kind of bonded and that was one of the concerns from clinicians was what happens when they have to give the Theravot back. And so we've created a stuffed version of Theravot that we can replace it for lower cost that they can then keep with them afterwards to kind of keep that connection going. We're at the early stages of this, like you said. Where do you, what are the exciting opportunities with AI in this field that you think we could be in a few years from now? I think that there's better interactions that can occur once we can get better communications, better responses from the robots. We want to start using large language models to be able to just talk to the dog and tell it what you want versus having to pet it or talk to it in some other way or communicate. So I think there's a lot of different ways AI can be used. Having it adjust to the person individually so that it can create positive interactions and I think you can also have more fluid conversations once you can get better language communication. Really interesting. Thanks very much Professor Bethel from Mississippi State University. You're welcome. And we have much more coming up on AI for Goods Global Summit right here.