A man, identified as Dinesh Patel, developed 'Shalu', the world's first multi-lingual social humanoid robot in western India's Maharashtra, that can speak nine Indian languages and 38 foreign languages. Dinesh is a Computer Science teacher at Kendriya Vidyalaya in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in Mumbai.

Visuals witnessing the incident features the multi-lingual social humanoid robot introducing herself and describing her specifications. Furthermore, the bot engages in a conversation with its maker, Dinesh, where he frames the conversation in a way that highlights the different attributes of Shalu.

Dinesh was inspired to build a humanoid robot after watching the sci-fi movie 'Enthiran' and seeing the famous social humanoid robot, Sophia, during its visit to IIT Bombay. Sophia is developed by Hanson Robotics, a Hong-Kong based Robotics Company. However, Dinesh thought of building a similar robot in India at a cheaper cost, without compromising the key functionalities.

Once Dinesh was convinced that his goal could be achieved, he began working on the robot during his free time. It took him nearly three years to develop Shalu. Moreover, all parts of the bot were locally purchased given Dinesh's dedication towards the Prime Minister's Digital India Mission, Skill India Mission, and Make in India Mission.

India being a developing country, has an unimaginably high cost of procuring complex 3-D printed parts. Therefore, all parts of Shalu were custom-made with plastic, cardboard, aluminum, and other materials. Dinesh even used Arduino microcontroller, Raspberry Pi, and open-source software or libraries like Python, Tensorflow, and others for this bot.

Shalu is a low-cost robot having capabilities common to all humanoid robots. She can recognize faces, shake hands, identify objects, and show simple emotions such as happiness and anger. The robot can also initiate conversations based on predefined scripted social content by using Artificial Intelligence. Apart from that, Shalu can also solve simple math equations and conduct short quizzes on specified areas.

The humanoid robot is a soft skills expert and can be used as a personal assistant. She can reply to emails and send messages, deliver sun sign horoscopes, weather reports based on the date and daily news, and information about recipes, books, movies, as well as phone models,

Given the varied skillset, Shalu can be used as a teacher, lecturer, or receptionist. Furthermore, bots like Shalu can be used to keep elderly people or children company. However, given the fact that Shalu is a prototype, Dinesh aspires to make a few updates to the bot.

He is looking forward to 3D print body parts for Shalu for smooth movement with better quality motors. Moreover, he wishes to improve the robot's general social conversation skills and its capability to answer educational queries in varied languages. Lastly, he wants to use a real latex human face mask to express emotions with facial expression.

Shalu is the world's first humanoid robot that can speak nine Indian languages such as English, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Bangla, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Nepali. Apart from that, the bot can also speak in 38 foreign languages such as Japanese, German, and several others.