Babbling stage
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.

Social cues important
In the babble stage, those sounds don’t have any meaning. Later on the participants come back and they teach the robot the names of shapes on a cube. The robot learns by sharing the social context with the person interacting with it. Lyon explains that people find it easy to interact with DeeChee because of its human-like appearance and cuteness and react to it as if it were a child. If it were a computer screen this wouldn’t happen. So for DeeChee, interacting with what the other person is saying, or where they are looking, helps the process of learning.

Creating real-life scenarios
Lyon says that they want to extend their work to include verbs. Some of the challenges they found were creating the scenarios, which allow for the robot to associate the sounds with regular experiences. Also, as the ‘participants have been deliberately varied, with no selection criteria, the learning achievement of the robot consequently varies.’

Their success in teaching DeeChee to speak, using methods similar to those used to teach children, is a big step towards developing the future generation of interactive robots.