Salamanca High School is all set to introduce a humanlike robot called Sally and an AI learning assistant called Optio in its classrooms. 

The Salamanca City Central School District will become one of the first school districts in the United States to use a humanoid robot as a classroom teaching assistant. The school board approved the purchase of Realbotix’s M-Series humanoid robot, Sally, along with Optio. As per the district, the goal of introducing Sally is not to replace human teachers at all. In fact, they aim to help both the students and the teachers with their day-to-day school tasks. 

The most interesting thing about Sally is its human-like appearance. This seated humanoid robot has silicone skin and long brown hair. She also comes with facial expressions and is capable of upper-body movements. Although she remains stationary, she can still interact with the students as well as the teachers while the lectures are going on. 

Now you must be wondering how students will interact with Sally, right? So basically, students will log in using unique identification codes. This will allow Sally to remember previous conversations and provide personalized support based on their learning history.

Students will also get an AI avatar named Optio. It will be capable of providing learning support at any time of the day. Students will be able to get feedback by simply uploading a picture of their homework. And if they come across any difficult lessons, they’ll be able to ask Optio for help. They can also generate lessons as per their interests. And the most amazing feature of this avatar is that it can provide real-time translations in more than 100 languages.

Sally is not limited to helping students only. In fact, it is designed to help teachers, too. Let’s say, for example, a teacher loses track of a lesson or needs a reminder about the next topic. Now, since Sally is trained on the school’s curriculum, she can instantly guide the teacher on what to do. 

School officials say privacy and student safety were major priorities while developing the program. As per Superintendent Mark Beehler, both Sally and Optio operate on a closed system. This system is not connected to the public internet. He also said that Realbotix won’t have access to any kind of personally identifiable information of students. 

While interacting with Sally, students don’t need to worry about wrong answers. And that’s because she is trained in such a way that if she isn’t sure about a specific query, she’ll simply say “I don’t know” rather than misguiding the students. 

The company has added additional safeguards for the sake of students’ safety. Let’s say, for example, a student mentions suicide/self-harm or any other such topic; the system will automatically send an alert to the school administrators.

During a demo, Kiguel told the AI avatar that he is being bullied and he wants to take revenge. Guess what the avatar did? Rather than pushing him to do something wrong or dangerous, the system suggested that he should talk to an adult whom he trusts. It could be either his teacher, parents, or even a counselor or principal.

It is worth noting that this new project does come with some online public scrutiny. People are having mixed feelings about introducing a robot into a school. Some of them consider this a major step towards preparing students for future technological innovations. But at the same time, some people find it quite disturbing. For them, introducing AI into schools is something to be worried about. 

Although the debate is still going on, Salamanca plans to move ahead with the pilot this fall. Sally and Optio will be introduced in classrooms. And this would definitely be one of the first real-world deployments of a humanoid robot and an AI teaching assistant in the United States.