Artificial Intelligence

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Sony's Companion for the Lonely - AIBO

It is Christmas shopping time in the Western world. The Japanese have spread their wares across the super markets.This time they are flooding the market with Robos of various kinds. When Sony released the " AIBO" robo in Japan last year, it quickly become the consumer's best friend.Whoever could get their hand on $2500, rushed to the market and the limited edition was sold out in 20 minutes.In US,Sony's E-commerce server crashed as millions tried to buy the robot."AIBO" in Japanese means 'companion' and also stand for 'Artificial Intelligence Robo'.This was not a simple furby like toy but a sophisticated robot, which can chase balls and bark for attention.

So on November 16 th, Sony has started taking orders for the second generation AIBO. The new AIBO boasts of a 64 bit microprocessor and 32 MB memory, putting it in the same category as a modern PC.This digital bot is more dextrous than its predessor.In addition to all the tricks, it does a little dance and waves a front paw on hearing its name. Speech recognition software lets it learn 50 commands. The price also has fallen to $1500 this year. In future such robos could do the laundry and assist the elderly and the handicapped.This could turn out to beat the sales of US doller 5 billions earned by Sony's Play Station yearly.

Over the next few years as volume increases, the price is expected to fall below $300. Then it may attract the mass market. More such companion robos from all other Electronic giants in Japan, also may soon see the marketplace.

AIBO becomes a close friend.
Aibo can take photograph.
Aibo can sing and dance.
Moves freely,and energetically.
Respond to your greetings.
Eyes and tail emit light .
Call,it will respond.
Strong desire to perform.
Three colors to choose.
Ignore,it will become lethargic.

More on Artificial Intelligence and its use in modern production methods shall follow soon.

Massachusetts Inst. of Technology - Media Laboratory: Research into various speech technology areas, including understanding sound cues, gestures, and social behavior, as well as vision.

California Inst. of Technology - Physics of Computation: Caltech group makes VLSI chips to simulate biological neural functions such as vision, hearing and adaptive systems.

Speechreading: Index of speech-reading (aka lipreading) research laboratories, references and resources around the world.

Speech Research Index: Lists more than 50 speech research facilities in both the USA and around the world.

Speechreading by Man and Machine: Aims to incorporate visual information into acoustic speech recognition to improve accuracy. Covers machine and human lipreading.

21st Century Eloquence: Speech recognition and voice technology company provides a collection of resources. With articles, comparative charts and a monthly newsletter.

Advanced Recognition Technologies: Purchase and download ART's smARTwriter and smARTspeak, voice and handwriting recognition software, for Windows CE, 95 and NT.

Carnegie Mellon University - Speech at CMU: Speech technology research project offers access to research papers and downloadable dictionaries.

Center for Spoken Language Understanding: Provides state-of-the-art spoken-language systems. Research includes language understanding, and language and speaker identification.

Commercial Speech Recognition Index: Access sites about voice recognition hardware and software sources from this comprehensive index. Read the FAQ.

Computer Speech and Language: Peer-reviewed journal covers the field of speech recognition and understanding by both machines and people. Browse article abstracts.

Intelligent Speech Analyser: Looks at the various analysis programs and the methods they employ. Also includes an archive of articles.

Interactive Drama, Inc.: Specializes in experiential learning through voice-controlled multimedia simulations. Details their medical and language training projects.

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Massachusetts Inst. of Tech. - Spoken Language Systems: Group works toward interactive conversational systems. Provides news, descriptions and publications.

Microsoft Research - Speech Technology: Discusses the software company's "Whisper" speech recognition engine, now featured in its Microsoft Phone and Agent applications.

Oregon Graduate Institute - CSLU: Center for Spoken Language Understanding pursues advances in spoken language systems.

Speech Technology - Microsoft: Check out Microsoft's current research into speech technology. Find descriptions of past projects, contact info, publications and downloads.

Voxware: Offers a Web-based speech recognition product called VoiceLogistics. Review news and information for investors.

Computing Canada - Speech System Helps Pilots New!: Learn about speech-recognition technology developed to assist helicopter pilots without requiring them to key in any commands.