UBTech, listed in Hong Kong, gets a state-media showcase for its bionic skin and humanoid hardware, plus named uses beyond factories, from study bases to city reception venues.
Xinhua News Agency and Hong Kong-listed robot maker UBTech (9880.HK) unveiled two humanoid robot news anchors on November 5 at the AI and Chinese Modernization forum (人工智能与中国式现代化论坛) of the seventh World Media Summit in Beijing. Xinhua described the pair as the world’s first bionic humanoid robot news anchors. Film director Zhang Yimou served as lead image designer, and both robots are built at life size.
The female anchor is named Xinyan (新言) and the male anchor Xinyu (新语), according to a second Xinhua report, which said Xinhua fully owns the intellectual property. The anchors draw their content from Xinhua Yudian (新华语典), the agency’s AI agent for current-affairs news, which connects them to an authoritative corpus that Xinhua says makes what they say traceable and controllable. UBTech supplied the full technology chain, from bionic skin, embodied AI hardware and an operating system to an emotion model and mass production of the complete robots.
The launch puts a commercial humanoid maker inside China’s main state news agency. Every account of it found so far originates with Xinhua, including copies run by The Paper and Beijing Daily, so performance details such as speech quality, latency and cost have not been tested by outside reporters.
Xinhua kept control of what the robots say
The design starts from the content source. UBTech founder, chairman and chief executive Zhou Jian said the robots use a three-part "brain, expression, control" technical chain, pulling reviewed current-affairs information in real time to avoid the risks of hallucination, the term for confident errors produced by generative AI. In The Paper’s account, Zhou divided the work three ways: Xinhua supplied news standards and content, UBTech the full-stack technology, and Zhang’s team the robots’ appearance. A market report on Sina Finance, credited to Caiwen (财闻), identified UBTech by its Hong Kong stock code.
Zhang, as Xinhua reported his remarks, worked from camera aesthetics and character to balance the solemn, rigorous standards of news presentation with natural, finely detailed lifelike realism. One of the robots read the news of the forum’s opening on stage, according to Xinhua’s summit roundup.
Qian Tong, director of Xinhua’s New Media Center, called the robot anchors a new job type in the newsroom, cast in a supporting role. He said they would help with news presentation, output in several languages and live interaction.
The robots extend a long line of Xinhua AI presenters
Xinhua has shown synthetic presenters before. Its earlier AI anchor was built with search company Sogou and revealed at the fifth World Internet Conference, as Business Recorder reported. Xinyan and Xinyu move that idea into physical robots that can present on camera at a live event, which is where UBTech’s hardware comes in.
The agency framed the launch as part of a wider program. It said it has introduced more than 220 digital and intelligent tools under a principle of empowering journalists, not replacing them. At the same forum, Xinhua signed agreements to set up the Xinhua AI Industry Alliance (Beijing Base), meant to link government, media, technology companies and think tanks, and launched a research project on mobile news-image technology and authenticity standards.
Foreign speakers at the forum set limits on AI in their own newsrooms. A journalism-school head from Britain’s PA Media Group said the agency allows AI for back-office work such as transcription and research, but does not use it to generate finished news. Xinhua’s roundup said "humans lead, machines assist" should be the basic principle of AI-assisted journalism. The summit runs in Beijing from November 5 to 9, with nearly 500 representatives of nearly 330 organizations from 112 countries and regions, according to Xinhua.
Deployment beyond the stage is still a plan
Zhou listed the settings where the anchors could work next: study bases, city reception venues, overseas cultural exchanges and reporting on deep-space exploration. None has a date. For UBTech, the value lies in showing that its bionic skin and humanoid hardware can carry a public-facing role that depends on appearance, speech and live interaction, with China’s state news agency as its partner.
The first concrete sign will be the anchors appearing in Xinhua’s regular programming, in a language other than Chinese, or at one of the venues Zhou named. An order from another broadcaster or a city government would show whether UBTech can sell the product outside its partnership with the state agency.