On Monday 31 August 2026, Osaka Metro opened a humanoid station-attendant trial with KDDI and AVITA. The official three-company release went out on 28 August. Sankei filed from Umeda on opening day and named the unit Hinata. The AI Insider carried an English write-up the same Monday. The window runs through 15 September 2026: Metro Opus Umeda from 31 August to 6 September, then Metro Opus Tanimachi 9-chome East from 9 to 15 September. Hours are 11:00 to 20:00, except Monday, which starts at 13:00. That is a timed shop-counter demo. It is not a free-roaming platform attendant, and I will not upgrade it into one.
Sankei prints the body numbers that Monday’s English wires mostly skipped: about 178 cm tall, about 48 kg, no gender setting, Osaka Metro uniform, multiple cameras, eyes and mouth that move, and an arm that can point. It also says Hinata answers in about 60 languages, including English and Chinese. Those are opening-day body and language claims from Sankei. They are not a joint continuous-duty table. They are not a payload at reach. They are not a thermal limit for an eight-hour counter shift in a noisy ticket-hall pocket.
Fixed counter. Not the platform. Not the gate.
Read the placement carefully. Osaka Metro’s 28 August release puts the machine inside Metro Opus shops next to the ticket gates, not on the platform edge and not inside the fare gates as a walking attendant. Umeda is immediately outside the Midosuji Line north ticket gate. Tanimachi 9-chome is on the east side of the east ticket gate. Passengers walk up to a dedicated counter. The robot does not chase a lost tourist across the concourse. That matters more than the Gemini branding.
The job list from the release is narrow: station layout, transfer routes, nearby tourism tips, and a QR code on a display the robot holds so you can pull a route map onto your phone. Nikkei’s 28 August note frames the same pitch as a labor-shortage experiment. Labor shortage is the policy sentence. The hardware sentence is one humanoid at a gift-shop counter for two weeks, split across two stations. Do not confuse those.
KDDI supplies communications and AI infrastructure and runs the trial ops. AVITA supplies the humanoid, dialogue, and communication stack. Osaka Metro supplies station know-how and measures demand plus passenger acceptance. That split is printed in the release table. It does not disclose who owns the actuator stack, who certifies stop behavior next to a crowd, or what happens when the model hallucinates a transfer.
Gemini claims are dialogue claims. Joints stay blank.
The 28 August release and KDDI’s 30 July Gemini note both lean on Google’s generative model. KDDI says the July integration used Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Preview, with serial processing meant to cut the multi-second lag that API relay used to leave in the conversation. The companies talk about reading tone, speed, intonation, and emotional nuance, then answering with warmer non-verbal cues. Those are dialogue-latency and speech-affect claims. They are not a published end-to-end latency number measured in a live Umeda rush. They are not a joint torque curve. They are not a wrist force window.
What stays unpublished is the hardware sheet a buyer or a safety engineer would ask for first. Monday’s materials do not print degrees of freedom. They do not print peak or continuous torque at the shoulder, elbow, or waist. They do not print arm payload, finger DoF, battery watt-hours, charging interval, or a continuous-duty temperature limit. Sankei’s 178 cm / 48 kg pair is useful and still thin. FIRGELLI will not invent a DoF count to fill the blank.
Lineage is also not a datasheet. Osaka Metro and KDDI both say the body is a refreshed version of a Hiroshi Ishiguro design used for the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo pavilion “Future of Life.” Ishiguro is AVITA’s CEO and an Osaka University professor. Expo pedigree explains the face and the service framing. It does not prove the machine can stand through a full weekday without a chaperone, and it does not say whether the base is wheeled, statically planted, or somehow bipedal on a shop floor. The release language is “installed” at the shop. Treat that as a planted counter unit until someone publishes locomotion.
What this trial can actually prove.
A two-week, two-station counter demo can answer a few real questions. Do passengers stop. Do they ask transfers in English or Chinese. Does the QR handoff beat a wall map. Does the mic hold up when a train arrives. Does anyone escalate to a human when the model is wrong. Those are useful acceptance metrics. They are not factory metrics. They are not proof that a Gemini-fronted humanoid can replace a station attendant at a gate, on a platform, or during a service disruption.
Keep the adjacent Japan stories separate. J-HRTI’s Narashino data factory, which opened to press around 26–27 August with roughly thirty Unitree G1-class machines collecting VR teleop data, is a different thesis: shared industrial data, not a metro information desk. Do not merge those into one “Japan humanoid week” claim. Monday’s Osaka story is service dialogue at a fixed counter.
FIRGELLI already hosts SoftBank Pepper as a discontinued reception and customer-service profile. Pepper is not Hinata. Pepper is shorter, older, and wheeled. Using it as a stand-in only marks the category: a service torso meant to talk, not a factory arm meant to press. If you are comparing this trial to Kinisi’s crankshaft bearing pilot or Galbot’s Hong Kong store open, hold it to the same bar. A named duty. A published force or payload. A measured failure mode. Monday opened a bilingual information counter in a Metro Opus shop. It did not publish the joints.