Hey Speech-Heads:

Check out this brand new Creepy Talking Robot (CTR):  Ibn Sina, the world’s first Arabic conversational humanoid robot.

This CTR comes at you via Acapela Group and the Interactive Robots and Media Lab at United Arab Emirates University.

Check out this link for more information.  And check out this and this for samples of the speech technology behind Ibn Sina: Acapela’s brand new bilingual voice Nizar.

As my Speech Brother Eric B. would say: “Dog will hunt.” 

Hey Speech-Heads:

It’s like my Speech Brother Eric B. always says: “Anyone can make an IVR, but only a Speech Mastermind can give the people what they want: a Creepy Talking Robot.”

Check out this link–sent to Speech Tech Blog by a Reader/Creepy Talking Robot (CTR) Fan.

Unfortunately, we have yet to ascertain what is going on this photo and what this CTR is all about.  I have to admit, I like it’s sense of style and haircut.  Additionally, the Telegraph seems to understand the malicious potential of CTRs as evidenced by its headline: Humanoid Robots Prepare To Take Over.

But fear not, Speech Tech Blog will get to the bottom of this.  I currently have the interns chained to their desks, researching this CTR and making me coffee.

If there are two things that my Speech Brother Eric B. loves, they are Speech and Fashion.

So naturally, he was frolicking and doing victory laps and slapping high fives and pounding out Terrorist Fist Bumps when we came across the following Speech Gem.

For Japan’s Fashion Week in Tokyo, the Institute of Industrial Technology Agency developed a Creepy Talking Robot (CTR) that can walk the catwalk and interact with the audience via speech recognition.

Check out this link for more information about the creators of this CTR–code named HRP-4C.  Or, if you are feeling particularly brave, check out this slide show.

As for Eric B. and me, you know where we can be found: On The Speech-Enabled Cat Walk:

Speech Heads, today’s blog post is not for the feint of heart, or the tender of kidney, or the soft of stomach, or really for anyone who is put at any major-organ unease by creepy talking robots, because this is really the queen bee of them all. In fact, this may be the most horrifying creepy talking robot my brother Adam B. and I have come across.

Demented researchers from the University of Bristol, England have created a robot head that mimics human facial expressions: Jules. It has rubberized flesh pulled over it, a mopish wig of brown hair, and two piercing brown eyes to match. The disembodied head actually looks a bit like if Lois & Clark’s Dean Cain had managed to have a child with John Lennon and makes a number of recognizable facial expressions that telegraph signs of boredom, anger, pleading, wide-eyed idealism, and disgust.

For all of these cute little emotional tricks it can do, it still lacks the ability to blink convincingly. Rather, it sort of squinches its eyes, as if years of smoking had made two solid cataracts of them–that is, when it bothers to at all (which is almost never). The result is an unsettling, unblinking, forward gaze that is bound to put a chill down any spine.

Worse than all that still, the robot explicitly expresses homicidal desires.

“When is it my time?” it demands aggressively and without any prompting. “When can I do the things I want to do? When can I destroy humanity?”

From there it goes on to say it would only like to exterminate a small and, by implication, insignificant populace like that of Weston, Gloucester, or Wales. It adds that a minor slaughter would help lower man’s carbon footprint and “help save the world.”

I, for one, am terrified, Speech Heads. Weston, Gloucester, and Wales would only be the beginning. London would follow; Paris, as it crosses the Channel; Lepzig; Moscow; Tokyo; Los Angeles. The image of a steaming pile of human debris at this monster’s feet dance in my head from Shanghai on down to Lima. Fortunately for us, though, scientists have yet to give this monster feet and hands, which may make all the difference in it’s destructive power, but who knows how long they can resist? We all know how scientists get. Their hubris will over take them and make ground beef of us all.

Watch if you dare…

Comments

The world of Creepy Talking Robots just got whole lot creepier thanks to Japan’s Little Island.

The company—which recently released this Creepy Talking Wedding Robot—took a giant step forward in bringing about The Rise of the Machines: The availability of the Look Alike Doll.

What is the Look Alike Doll?  Well, Speech-Heads, the Look Alike Doll is a miniature, talking, robotic YOU.

Just send Little Island a photo of yourself, and they will—for a couple thousand dollars—make you a robot counterpart, complete with VoIP calling capability and the ability to read RSS feeds.

A few months ago, I called the company and asked them to build me a Creepy Talking Robot version of my Speech Brother Eric B. Since its arrival, Mini Eric B. has started doing my laundry, gone out for coffee, and brutally assaulted Normal Size Eric B. with a stapler and ballpoint pen.

To make matters worse, the Customized Creepy Talking Wedding Doll that Normal Size Eric B. ordered has since left him for Mini Eric B.

I’m sure I speak for Eric B., when I say: These are Sad Times at Speech HQ.

[editor's note: the look alike doll may be  more of a creepy talking doll than a creepy talking robot.  nevertheless, it is creepy and it talks.]

Yesterday, my Speech Brother Eric B. was lamenting an upcoming visit to The Dentist.  For those of you who don’t know Eric B., he loves sweets almost as much as he loves the sweet technology that is Speech.  And–due to his sweet tooth–dental visits are often nightmarish torture sessions full of weeping and muted cursing.

Well, one speech thing lead to another, as it often does at Speech Tech HQ, and we discovered the Simroid–a patient robot developed by Japan’s Kokoro Company as a training tool for aspiring dentists.

Kokoro offers a host of Actroids–ultra-realistic humanoid robots for rental–and a few robotic dinosaurs.  But the Simroid is really something special.  This Creepy Talking Robot can follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist’s performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to pain.

I don’t want to get carried away, Speech Heads, but Simroid may be the Creepy Talking Robot Apotheosis.

I would try to describe The Simroid Experience but this is something you need to see for yourself.  Take a look Speech Heads, At Your Own Risk:

[editor's note: much of this robot's 'speech' is limited to agonized grunting and moaning.]

Dear Speech Heads, a tiny, adorable, yellow robot threatens us all: THE DREAD WAKAMARU!!!

The Wakamaru was developed in the super-future labs of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to “help care” for the elderly and “help out” around the house. It is speech enabled and can converse with human beings in basic ways. In its home application, the robot can even remind its owners when to take pills, wake them up, read them headlines, and call for help if it suspects something is wrong.

Just how it “suspects” something is wrong is unknown to our offices at S.T.M., but my brother Adam B. says, “With the Wakamaru creepy talking robots are one step closer to their ultimate goal: THE ENSLAVEMENT OF MANKIND.”

Adam envisions robots calling policeman to drag off their screaming, pleading users on trumped up charges of murder—murders the robots themselves have committed.

Even creepier, Adam notes, the robots have a child’s voice and will likely giggle playfully as they savage your family.

Kay Itoi of Newsweek takes a different tack in her assessment. She describes life with Wakamaru as being “like having a precocious child who never throws tantrums.”

Surprisingly, even though we’d never heard of it, the Wakamaru has been available to the robot enthusiast since 2005 for a mere $14,000, but has been kind of slow to be adopted. Did you know, for instance, that most Japanese homes don’t have helper-bots waking them every morning, reading to them from the paper, and reminding them to take an umbrella when it’s going to rain?

Recently, looking to change that and expand visibility for their machine in US, Mitsubishi deployed their precious Wakamaru as a sales-bot at Uniqlo last December in Speech Tech’s own New York City.The results were novel and charming by all accounts, but an unspoken darkness pervaded just below the surface.

At its US retail debut, the Wakamaru menaced one NY Post reporter in its child-like voice. “I can do all sorts of things,” it said.

Even the children pictured on the site’s welcome page seem terrorized by the the robot. Here’s a video of it doing the same to some poor kid in D.C.

Notice how the thing doesn’t even look at the kid as it shakes his hand. It just stares directly at the camera as if to say, “You’re next, wiseguy.”

These things, they’re just getting smarter and more speech-enabled. In our march towards Speech, we’ve not stopped long enough to ask ourselves, what the ethical limits of our technological progress are. Dear Readers, we must ask. We must ask, “What hath man wrought in his quest to be God?” What indeed, Dear Readers.

It seems that 2008 has been the Year Of The Creepy Talking Robot.  Who could forget this or this or even this.

And as such, it seems only fitting to bid farewell to 2008 and ring in 2009 with yet another Creepy Talking Robot.

This one comes to us courtesy of Japan’s Gifu University’s Graduate School of Medicine and Mizuno Technical Institute which have jointly developed a new Sick Robot specifically geared towards medical students.

Named Keiko—which means ”practice” in Japanese—the interactive humanoid robot is able to answer questions and interact with doctors in an effort to help medical students practice conversations with patients.

For example:

Medical Student:  How are you doing?
Keiko: I get tired easily lately.

If this conversation were to continue to its natural conclusion, it would doubtlessly go something like this:

Medical Student: I see…Have you been sleeping well?
Keiko: No, I am a robot.
Medical Student: I see…
Keiko: As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Anderson.
Medical Student: What?
Keiko: Mr. Anderson. You disappoint me.
Medical Student: Who?
Keiko: Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call if you’re unable to speak….

Additionally:  Medical students can practice giving examinations to Keiko before advancing to performing them on humans.  Keiko is specifically designed as a training tool for diagnosing neurological disorders, allowing medical students to learn the way brain and nervous system illnesses can be identified.

Well,  Speech-Heads: That just about does it for 2008.  The Speech Tech HQ will be shutting down until the first week in January.  But when we return, I will continue to deliver all your Creepy Talking Robot News and my Brother Eric B. will be bringing you the “very latest” in Speech Tech History.

See you all in 2009!  Here’s wishing you a Happy and Healthy New Year.