RoboJase plays the Glee club

A robot comedian is to take to the stage of Birmingham's Glee Club on Thursday.

RoboJase has been modelled on Gadget Show presenter Jason Bradbury, and its five-minute routine will be filmed for the Channel 5 programme.

Jokes are pre-programmed into the automaton, which uses facial recognition technology to read the crowd to determine which go down the best. It is mobile, and uses sophisticated voice synthesiser technology to replicate Bradbury’s voice.

The software was tested at nine live performances during the Gadget Show Live exhibition at London’s Earls Court earlier this month, which helped select the material for this week's show.

Bradbury, who started his entertainment career as part of a double act with David Walliams, said: 'The idea for RoboJase came about when North One TV, makers of The Gadget Show, tasked us with replacing ourselves with artificial intelligence.

'Since then RoboJase has developed from a talking head to a life-size fully functioning robot. Naturally I’d like to keep my job, so we thought we’d test him out on the comedy circuit instead, a career I set aside to work on The Gadget Show.

'For any comedian, playing their first major show at one of the UK’s top comedy venues can be intimidating. In order to give RoboJase the best chance we are using SHORE (Sophisticated High-Speed Object Recognition Engine) technology, which has been set to detect audience reactions. Out of the top performing jokes we’re looking to hone five minutes of material for the discerning Glee Club crowd.'

It won't be the only technology on display at the club on Thursday, as also on the bill is Lee Ridley  – aka Lost Voice Guy - who performs his stand-up using software on an iPad, as his cerebral palsy means he is unable to speak.

Fellow Gadget Show presenter Rachel Riley will also be at the show, which is being filmed for broadcast on Monday December 16.

Club owner Mark Tughan said: 'Technology tends to get a bad press in comedy routines, whether its Peter Kay’s nana getting to grips with the answering machine or Flight Of The Conchords’ song The Humans Are Dead, so it’ll be interesting hearing what technology makes of us.'

RoboJase is one of several robotic comics currently being developed by academics.

The artificially intelligent RoboThespian has perviously performed comedy written by stand-up Tiernan Douieb at the Barbican Centre in London, using the same SHORE recognition software used by RoboJase

Comedian and computer programmer Owen Niblock is working on a Gig-A-Tron 5000, which responds to heckles from a series of pre-prepared rejoinders. Niblock hopes to have her competing successfully against a human comedian by 2020.

And researchers in the Edinburgh are working on joke-generating software based on Twitter one-liners. Gags published this summer all followed the formula of: 'I like my men like I like my tea – hot and British' and came up with the variations: ‘I like my women like I like my computers – exported from a sweatshop in China’; ‘I like my women like I like my computers - free of viruses’ and ‘I like my men like Iike my acorns – buried.’

Here is Bradbury and his robotic alter-ego at the MIPCOM TV festival earlier this year:

Published: 12 Nov 2013