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Teaching a robot to talk
Wired ran a story a few months back, detailing MIT researcher Deb Roy's experiments to catalogue language acquisition, by videotaping the first three years of his son's life. His goal is to teach his robot "Toco" to talk; he hopes recreating stimuli similar to his son's environment and experiences will allow Toco to develop linguistic ability. By recording the early stages of his boy's life, Roy is seeking to supplement his steel-and-silicon investigations: His three-year-long study will document practically every utterance his young son makes, from the first gurglings of infancy through the ad hoc eloquence of toddlerdom, in an unprecedented effort to chart — uninterrupted — the entire course of early language acquisition. The goal of the Human Speechome Project, as he boldly calls his program, is to amass a huge and intricate database on a fundamental human phenomenon. Roy believes the Speechome Project will, in turn, unlock the secrets of teaching robots to understand and manipulate language. (ELHAM)
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