Robot greets customers in Departmental store Takashimaya in Ginza. The store had enrolled the services of speech-recognizing robot called Saya for a week. And for a week shoppers were treated to a very different kind of store assistant.

Saya was capable to guide the shoppers to relevant floors of the shopping store and also can respond to shoppers’ queries and complaints in more than 700 ways.

The female robot was developed by Hiroshi Kobayashi of the Tokyo University of Science in 2004. It also can respond to questions about previous jobs and even where she was created.

Saya was recently involved in a trial at the Tokyo primary school. It was capable of catching students’ passing notes and coping homework as well as giving them a rather stern telling off.