The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that a United Nations technology agency assembled a group of robots that physically resembled humans at a news conference Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an event meant to spark discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. An Associated Press dispatch to The Globe says that the nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference centre for what the UN's International Telecommunication Union billed as the world's first news conference featuring humanoid social robots. Reporters were asked to speak slowly and clearly and were informed that time lags in responses would be because of the Internet connection and not the robots themselves. That did not prevent awkward pauses, audio problems and some stilted or inconsistent replies. Popular tech products such as Apple's Siri have been using speech recognition technology to respond to relatively simple human queries for more than a decade. However, last year's release of ChatGPT, a chatbot with a strong command of the semantics and syntax of human language, has triggered worldwide debate about the rapid advancement of AI.