Takanishi Laboratory is designing a robot — the Waseda Talker-7 — that realistically replicates human speech via a 19 Degrees of Freedom Vocal System that includes lungs, vocal cords, tongue, velum, jaw, and lips.

The robot makes its sounds the same way humans do: through adjustments to the aforementioned organs as air moves over them.

The project’s goal is to (1) create a robot that can reproduce human speech and (2) use the robot to reduce human speech to mechanical movements that can then be built it into a cell phone for high-compression speech synthesis.

All of this is pretty cool and we at Speech Tech Blog are impressed and we recommend you check out the attached video of the robot in action.

There’s just one problem:

Is it just me or does the bespectacled robot appear to be moaning for someone to kill him–kind of like that clone of Ripley that begs for a quick death in Alien 3?

Maybe it’s just me.

Or maybe it’s the sound of my editor moaning from inside the storage closet again.  It’s hard to say for sure.