Robots can learn languages from people

Robots can develop language skills through interaction with humans, according to a new study from the University of Hertfordshire (UK) in PLoS ONE.

British researchers Caroline Lyon, Professor Christopher Nehaniv and Dr Joe Saunders have just completed a new iTalk project, which is done with iCub robotics.

iCub is taught to speak like a child

The purpose of this project is to find out how the language learning process takes place. At first, the robot can only babble without sound, then express the words as a string of messy sound does not sentence words.

But after a few minutes of ' conversation ' by talking to iCub as for a child, the robot starts to adjust its language and emits a complete set of words, just like shapes and colors. .

Dr Caroline Lyon said: "We all know that children are sensitive to sound frequencies in conversation, and these experiments demonstrate that sensitivity can be imitated and contribute to training the ability to tell the robot.

Participants in the iTalk project teach the talking robot the same methods used in teaching children, and the focus of that process is on the interaction between humans and robots.

Although iCub learned to speak, it still did not understand the meaning of each word. And that is the next goal of the iTalk project.