WORLDTECHXinhua Unveils Bionic Humanoid Robot News Anchors with UBTECH
What happened
Xinhua News Agency unveiled two bionic humanoid (a robot built in roughly human shape) robot news anchors developed with UBTECH on November 5, 2026, at the Artificial Intelligence and Chinese Modernization forum in Beijing, describing them as the world’s first of their kind. The male anchor is Xinyu and the female anchor is Xinyan.
Both use life-size human proportions and were customized for news scenarios. Xinhua says it holds complete independent intellectual-property rights for the jointly developed robots.
During the forum, one robot read the opening news on stage, providing an immediate demonstration of the presentation role. Designed for Broadcast Presentation Chinese film director Zhang Yimou served as chief image designer and led the embodied visual design.
His stated aim was to balance the solemn, rigorous requirements of news presentation with natural bionic realism. The design work drew on camera aesthetics and the shaping of personal demeanor, tying the robots’ appearance to the visual conventions of broadcast journalism rather than treating human resemblance as a standalone objective.
The anchors connect through a technical interface to Xinhua Yudian, the agency’s AI current-affairs information agent and authoritative corpus. Xinhua says this arrangement makes the content traceable, secure and controllable.
UBTECH’s robotics contribution spans bionic skin, embodied-intelligence hardware, an operating system, an emotional large model and manufacturing of the complete robots. Zhou Jian, UBTECH’s founder, chairman and CEO, said the resulting brain–expression–control technical chain retrieves reviewed, authoritative current-affairs information in real time and avoids dissemination risks from generative-AI hallucinations (an AI system stating something that is not true) .