Robot Language Course

[Design Probes Moderator]

ROILA is a spoken language for robots. It is constructed to make it easy for humans to learn, but also easy for the robots to understand. ROILA is optimized for the robots’ automatic speech recognition and understanding. Roila is being developed at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Department of Industrial Design, Designed Intelligence Group with the aim of developing an artificial language that would make communication with an ever growing community of 'service' robots easier. Omar Mubin worked on an artificial language that should overcome the current difficulties of speech recognition. The basic problem of speech recognition is that we have too much nuance in our language, not only on a global scale with different languages and the dialects that come with that, but also on a personal level. Speech recognition software can be trained to understand personal nuances, which would work for your personal robot, but it is a different story for 'public robots'. Omar Mubin has been looking at several world languages such as; Volapük, Esperanto and Toki Pona, to come to the conclusion that he would have to generate a new language that would have the least of acoustic confusion. He finally used a computer to generate this new language and tested it at a highschool using Mindstorm robots. The first results of the new language showed that communication improved by 19% compared to English language. Somehow it sounds logical that in order to communicate with robots we should also make an effort in learning their language, after all, they might be the fastest growing species on earth.