Japan to sell talking robots that won't try to make sense

Japan to sell talking robots that won't try to make sense

But who wants to buy a politician?

I agree with the article, it does not make sense to spent $1100 in something useless.

“Voice recognition has always been very difficult for robots,” Ishiguro said. “Human beings should instead adjust to what robots can do.”

Uhhhh.... no. Humans design tools to fit them, not fit themselves around the tools. And otaku fantasies aside, robots are tools, nothing more.

Props on getting the robot to utilize audio input for commands, but if it can't understand human speech then it's not really understanding robot speech either.

Rather, this is just INPUT A -> (Choose from possible outputs randomly) -> OUTPUT B. This is not understanding and very little more than what my TV does when I push buttons on my remote control.

Actually, while sometimes very comical, doesn't Siri already "understand" a lot of human speech? Why not build on that instead of reinventing the wheel?

“Voice recognition has always been very difficult for robots,” Ishiguro said. “Human beings should instead adjust to what robots can do.”

We've made great progress in voice recognition (speech to text). It's understanding the meaning that machines have a problem with.

Consu,er Electronic Show in Las Vegas every year made in Japan robots are shown, First time, Japanese and English speaking receptionist robot screwed me up. This year, Toshiba;s robot had mouth moving and face moved like a person. Tobots in factories are not like people but CES displaying robots had face moved like real person. This year, Toshiba's robot behaved like a movies actress

This reminds me of the article a few years ago where a Japanese professor was suggesting that Japanese stop trying to learn difficult, "correct" English and just make everyone else in the world learn to understand "Japanese English." Why bother making something the right way, just make the person fit the inferior product through lowered expectations.

Soooo these robots are about as advanced as the 50 year old animatronics at Disneyland? I wonder who funds this guy...

Sota, shown to reporters at a Tokyo museum Tuesday, goes on sale in July at under 100,000 yen each. To fully enjoy its features, one would have to buy at least two of them, although people can buy just one.

“Don’t stop at just two. Please buy three or four,”

Lol what a racket!

In a demonstration, one CommU said to another CommU, "Do you know Denmark?"

It replied: "I love Denmark," to which the first said, "I love Denmark, too."

Curious mind wants to know, why on earth someone would pay about 100,000 yen for each to put up with such robotic chitcat and surprisingly the inventor is suggesting to buy three or four to increase the boredom intensity!!

In this era of smart devices, a startup can easily come up with the idea of talking robots where the "Robot aps" of multiple devices (be it phone or pad) which would communicate more intelligently than these dolls smattering of greetings or repeated agreed replies to make it sound little humanoid.

Japan is really loosing grip on Robot Technology (like on many other technology fields it sounds) indeed if this is the best that they can come up with....sounds like the limitation is software based and Japan needs to get connected with what is being done currently worldwide in A.I. research. There are a prototype of a website online application that mimic conversations, so why not apply this to a robot ?

When I first read this article I thought of how stupid it was, and the uselessness of it. On the other hand, having robots learn to communicate with other robots could be the path to creating smarter, intelligent robots. We rate our intelligence on our ability to communicate with other humans; via language, customs and traditions, religion, and sexual/social intercourse. Maybe we should develop better communications skills among robots, so that they may be able to communicate better with us. How robots interact with other robots can't be the same as they communicate with us. Robots need to develop their own language; by letting them interact with other robots freely they can develop intellectually and higher sense of maturity. I would not buy a robot that just talks to other robots though; it seems more like R&D than consumerism. It would be interesting to see a bunch of robots interacting with one another over a given period of time; just to see how they change in conversationally and intellectually.

Guess this might be considered a great gift to seniors going senile. Both don't make sense so it might just work!