Video: Look who's talking AT FIRST it's just noise: a stream of
incoherent sounds, burbling away. But, after a few minutes, a
fully formed word suddenly emerges: "red". Then another: "box".
In this way, a babbling robot learns to speak its first real
words, just by chatting with a human. Seeing this developmental
leap in a machine may lead to robots that speak in a more
natural, human-like way, and help uncover how children first
start to make sense of language. Between the ages of 6 and 14
months children move from babbling strings of syllables to
uttering actual words. It's a necessary step en route to
acquiring full language. Once a few "anchor" words have been
established, they provide clues as to where words may start and
finish and so it becomes easier for a child to learn to speak.
Inspired by this process, a team led by computer scientist
Caroline Lyon at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, programmed
their iCub humanoid robot, called DeeChee, with almost all the
syllables that exist in English – aro