Smart Glove: Voice Recognition for Sign Language Users. Voice-recognition has transformed our smart phones into personal assistants—a remarkable feat—but these benefits have thus far left out millions of people with speech or hearing impairments who rely on sign language.
There exists no comparable way for computers to capture and act on a dialect of gestures. Until now. An invention called EnableTalk from a crew of Ukranian programmers and designers (named the “QuadSquad”) has the potential to transform the way that sign language speakers communicate with digital devices, as well as the rest of the non-signing population. EnableTalk looks like a high-tech biking glove, equipped with 15 sensors that recognize the gestures of a signers’ hands, send the information to a software program via Bluetooth, and translate the data into sound played though smartphone speakers. If the technology is successful, the implications for improving the lives of the speech and hearing impaired are endless. Image via EnableTalk. Documentation. UK Researchers Using Charles Babbage Robot Head to Develop Emotional Machines. "Charles, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Peter Robinson says to the passenger sitting in the car next to him.
The passenger is a robot head that Robinson, a professor of computer technology at Cambridge University in England, is using to explore the role of emotions in human-machine interaction. Can computers understand emotions? Can computers express emotions? Can they feel emotions? These are the questions that Robinson and his team at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory want to answer. When people talk to each other, they express their feelings through facial expressions, tone of voice, and body postures. So could we build better computers, robots, and other machines if they could understand and respond to these hidden signals? Cambridge Ideas - The Emotional Computer.
Advance Female Android Aiko AI robot fembot. Female Android Robot fembot Aiko Demo 2. Aiko BRAINS Learning 3-D object demo English and Japanese. A Robot's Body of Knowledge. Photo: Humanoids and Intelligence Systems Lab/Karlsruhe Institute for Technology Click on the image for a larger view. 15 November 2010—Early risers may think it’s tough to fix breakfast first thing in the morning, but robots have it even harder.
Even grabbing a cereal box is a challenge for your run-of-the-mill artificial intelligence (AI). Frosted Flakes come in a rectangular prism with colorful decorations, but so does your childhood copy of Chicken Little. Do you need to teach the AI to read before it can grab breakfast? Maybe not. The robot’s thinking is not separated from its body, because it must use its body to learn how to think. Embodied cognition also requires sophisticated two-way communication between a robot’s lower-level sensors—such as its hands and camera eyes—and its higher-level planning processor. The PACO-PLUS system’s masters tested it in a laboratory kitchen.