Sasha Barbagallo

speaker

629 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Sasha Barbagallo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Briefing · Hezbollah rejects ceasefire + The 60-year plan to make you love robots · 4 Jun 2026 podcast

In fact, Sophia was designed to be as ultra-realistic as possible, was modelled on Audrey Hepburn, has lifelike skin, expressive eyes, no legs, just wheels, and there she was taking the world by storm.

She went on to major talk shows, gave interviews, was on the cover of magazines, addressed the UN, and in 2017, Saudi Arabia made her the world's first robot citizen –

For a moment, it felt like the future had arrived, but it hadn't.

Her Saudi citizenship immediately became a PR disaster, with critics quick to point out the irony that a female-presenting robot had just been granted more legal freedoms than actual women living under Saudi law.

And then came the bigger problem.

Safiya was largely an elaborate puppet.

Her high-profile interviews were heavily scripted and controlled behind the scenes, she couldn't speak off-script, and tech experts called it out.

Now, Sophia does live on in 2026, but as some sort of high-end corporate influencer, or, as her bio on Instagram tells us, an AI artist and humanoid performer.

Anyway, it's safe to say Sophia in the late 2010s was a bit of a shitshow, and perhaps a lesson in going too hard too fast.

She was also built on old tech, and next to today's large language models, the same ones powering ChatGBT and every other major AI assistant, she does come off looking a little prehistoric.

I mean, if you've ever used Chat, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, or even Grok, you would know that these models don't just follow scripts.

They can hold conversations, remember context, and in voice mode, they even add little human touches like pauses, breaths, laughs, and emotional tone.

And it's not because they need to, but because somewhere in a product meeting, someone decided that the breath makes it feel more real, more present, more alive.

And that brings us to robots like Frank, the robot who walked into our Melbourne studio who sparked this entire deep dive.

Frank isn't some sci-fi breakthrough.

If you actually follow all the prompts on his socials, you're not taken to his Chinese manufacturer.

You're taken to the website of a Melbourne logistics company.

Essentially, he's their $20,000 billboard.

And it's the same playbook that the Buddhist monks in South Korea have tapped into.

Because their new monk robot, named Gabi, is part of their broader strategy to get young people interested in the religion.

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