What Would Your Robot Say?

Last August, I read that Kirobo, the first robotic astronaut arrived at the International Space Station. The doll-sized humanoid robot weighs about 2 pounds, speaks Japanese, and has been heralded as the first robot to speak in space. When powered up, its historic greeting was, “On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step toward a brighter future for all," paying homage to Neil Armstrong’s moon landing speech.   

While I understand and appreciate the sentiment behind the message, the SF fan in me wanted to hear something else. I would have been “over the moon” happy if the first words from a robotic astronaut were “Hello Dave” honoring instead, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s HAL9000 robot. After all, both Kirobo and HAL9000 have facial recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing capabilities.  Lest you think of HAL9000 only as the villain, the computer saved the day in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010:  Odyssey Two.

If you could write the first words a robotic astronaut would speak in outer space, what would they be?  I would love to hear your responses.

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