Japan presents a robot monk that gives spiritual advice with AI

The machine was trained in Buddhist scriptures and can answer questions that the faithful sometimes do not dare to ask a person, Kyoto University, in western Japan, explained this Wednesday.

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The small bipedal humanoid has the ability to communicate orally.

“In the future, it is possible that it will assist or replace certain religious rituals traditionally performed by monks,” explained the Japanese university.

This robot is the latest creation of Seiji Kumagai, a professor at the university institution’s Institute for the Future of Human Society.

Using models from the American company OpenAI (ChatGPT) and others, he had already worked on religious chatbots such as “BuddhaBot” or a catechism bot.

For the robotic priest, Kumagai installed its “BuddhaBotPlus” software on a Chinese humanoid robot.

He was presented on Tuesday in a temple and, although he still has no face, he wears a gray habit and is able to join his hands in prayer.

Sitting in a chair, he gave advice to a journalist to calm her mental turmoil.

“Buddhism teaches that you should not blindly follow your thoughts or rush,” he declared in a deep voice to the NHK reporter. “One of the ways is to calm the mind and get rid of those thoughts,” he added.

Millions of people of different faiths use religious chatbots.

Kyoto already has an android without AI functionalities, Mindar, which delivers sermons and Germany presented in 2017 a robot that blesses the faithful in five languages.

The new machine combines artificial intelligence and robotics, offering spiritual advice and holding religious conversations while performing human-like physical movements.

Kyoto University is in favor of evaluating the use of these tools in religious environments from an ethical point of view.

But these humanoids could perform some tasks in the future due to the aging population and labor shortage in the archipelago.