The early stages of learning to talk, when babies charm us with a stream of sweet-sounding but meaningless sounds, has its own language – ‘babble’. Babble conversations with six-month-olds are great fun, as they learn the social skills of taking turns, distinguishing the pauses in sounds and facial expressions of the other person. Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are teaching a robot called ‘DeeChee’ to talk. The ‘iTalk’ project uses the same methods that teach babies to learn words by interacting with its parents.
Dr Caroline Lyon, who headed the team, which includes partner universities in Europe, programmed their iCub humanoid robot with most of the syllables in the English language. In the early stages of the robot learning language, people who are not involved in the research came in to talk to the robot as if it were a child. The robot begins to babble and when the adult hears sounds which are specific to English, they give the robot rewards such as ‘Well done DeeChee!’ The more times these sounds are exchanged the more likely it is the robot will repeat them, just as a human child does.
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