Rubber robot mouth simulates human voices.

This thing could give me nightmares...
www.popsci.com...

Over the weekend, video of a horrifying robot struggling to sound out vowels was passed around the web with little explanation other than, "This is creepy." Which it certainly is, but, after digging around for information, we found that despite the robot's nightmarish appearance and voice, its inventors actually intended the babbling for serious business--namely, for helping hearing-impaired people improve their speech articulation.

To enable the robot's speaking abilities, engineers at Japan's Kagawa University used an air pump, artificial vocal chords, a resonance tube, a nasal cavity, and a microphone attached to a sound analyzer as substitutes for human vocal organs. The robot not only talks, but it uses a learning algorithm to mimic the sounds of human speech. By inputting the voices of both hearing-impaired and non-hearing-impaired people into the microphone, researchers were able to plot the differences in sound on a map. During speech training, the robot "listens" to the subjects talk while comparing their pronunciation to that of subjects who are not hearing-impaired. The robot then generates a personalized visualization that allows subjects to adjust their pronunciation according to the target points on the speech map.

While the researcher's findings were published in 2008, the robot has come a long way, as it appears that early prototypes lacked lips and a human-looking nose.

Technology has really came a long way, for better or worse.

[edit on 20-4-2010 by Phlynx]

I don't get why this is so huge...

Did I miss something?

Asimo already talks just great and can speak english.... The Toyota partner bot can play instruments....

Not impressed

Originally posted by DaMod
I don't get why this is so huge...

Did I miss something?

Asimo already talks just great and can speak english.... The Toyota partner bot can play instruments....

Not impressed

This isn't a speaker. It's an actual skin like substance, and has an artificial vocal cord.

Wow, that is some amazing stuff. In a few more years we might actually have robots indistinguishable from humans.

Talk? who cars about that! we gots women to talk and they wont shut-up, this thing was made for oral sex, and you know you thought that too!.

That was really really freaky....

the sound of the robot speaking is stuck in my head now.
thanks a lot.

reply to post by godfish


I can not deny, that was my first reaction, but then I took my mind out of the gutter.