Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire (United Kingdom) have created a humanoid robot that is capable of learning to speak like a child between 6 and 14 months after engaging in a few minutes of “conversation” with humans. The work, echoed by the SINC agency, has been published this week in PLoS ONE magazine.
The robot, dubbed DeeChe and a member of the iCub series, is a childlike humanoid with artificial intelligence that has software with thousands of offline syllable possibilities. In the experiment, the participants, who were not researchers, addressed the robot as if it were a baby, using their own words. The humanoid began by emitting a few babbles and ended by pronouncing words of one or two syllables with the names of shapes and colors.
The research could be helpful in understanding language acquisition in humans. ? Babies are known to be sensitive to the frequency of sounds in speech, and these experiments show how this sensitivity can be modeled and contributed to word learning in robots ,? said Caroline Lyon, co-author of the work.
