The aim of this paper is to analyze a new phenomenon that is emerging in the field of social robotics, which we name as “roboid”. The roboid is a robot that is still at the prototype stage but claims to be fully functioning. We argue that the roboid has been created to handle a new phase between the prototyping and the commercialization of robots. In this intermediate phase, a wide-spread promotional campaign is organized by robot producers, with the purpose of understanding the desires, needs, and suggestions of potential customers. We present the first case of a a highly human-like roboid named Sophia. We carried out the visual analysis of the content and the content-agnostic factors of a selection of 15 videos uploaded on YouTube on the social robot Sophia and a qualitative analysis of the textual component of these videos to investigate a selected part of the promotional campaign on Sophia. Furthermore, on the 23,810 comments that users have posted on these videos, we applied quantitative analysis to explore the observers’ opinions about Sophia. Results highlight that: (1) a powerful but potentially ridiculous narrative has been used to build the rhetoric of Sophia; (2) the comments on the videos are too poor to enable a co-construction of this social robot with the audiences (implicit intention of Hanson Robotics); (3) the introduction of the roboid might be a very good solution to reduce the uncertainties that may occur when a new robot moves directly from the laboratory to the market.

本文的目的是分析在社交机器人领域中出现的一种新现象，我们将其称为“机器人”。该机器人是仍处于原型阶段但声称能正常运行的机器人。我们认为，机器人是为了处理机器人原型设计和商业化之间的新阶段而创建的。在此中间阶段，机器人生产商组织了广泛的促销活动，目的是了解潜在客户的需求，需求和建议。我们介绍了一个名为Sophia的高度人性化的类机器人的第一例。我们对社交机器人Sophia在YouTube上上传的15个视频中的部分内容进行了视觉分析，并对其内容进行了不可知论性分析，并对这些视频的文字部分进行了定性分析，以调查促销活动的选定部分索菲亚 此外，根据用户在这些视频上发布的23,810条评论，我们应用了定量分析来探索观察者对Sophia的看法。结果表明：（1）强有力的叙述但可能荒谬的叙述被用于构建索菲娅的言论；（2）视频上的评论太差，无法与观众共同构建这个社交机器人（Hanson Robotics的隐含意图）；