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A Talking Robot Sounds Like Humans

by Rolan Piquepaille | Submitted Sunday Feb 01, 2009 [03:05 PM]


The Takanishi Laboratory, at Waseda University, Japan, is home for many robotic projects, including a flutist I wrote about a while ago. Today, let's look at a talking robot, the Waseda Talker No. 4, or WT-4.

This anthropomorphic talking robot was built to better understand how the human vocal mechanism creates speech. The WT-4 has 19 degrees of freedom (DOF) for lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, teeth, nasal cavity and soft palate. With its vocal cords, it can produce Japanese vowels that are similar to human ones. The next version, the WT-5, will have even more sophisticated vocal cords.

"We developed a new anthropomorphic talking robot WT-4 (Waseda Talker No.4) that improved on WT-3. WT-4 had a human-like body to make the communication with a human more easily, and consisted of 1-DOF lungs, 4-DOF vocal cords and articulators (the 7-DOF tongue, 5-DOF lips, 1-DOF teeth, nasal cavity and 1-DOF soft palate), and could reproduce human-like articulatory motion; the total DOF was 19. We improved the connection mechanism between the vocal cords and the vocal tract and developed the new vocal cords. As a result, WT-4 could produce Japanese vowels that were more similar to human vowels than the previous robots and could produce stops, fricatives and nasal sounds of 50 Japanese sounds for human-like speech production."



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Tags:biomimicry  speech  humanoid  Waseda+Talker 

(http://www.primidi.com/2005/04/13.html)

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