Biomechanical Speech Synthesis

Description:

This robot is designed to replicate human speech as realistically as possible, employing a 19 DoF vocal system which includes lungs, vocal cords, tongue, velum, jaw, and lips. He makes sounds in exactly the same way you do, by making slight adjustments to all of these organs as air moves over them… He’s just not very good at it, so far.

You might think that the idea here is for robots to be able to reproduce human speech without sounding quite so much like, you know, robots, but that’s actually almost the opposite of what Takanishi Lab is trying to do. Rather, they are trying to get the robot to reproduce human speech so that they can reduce it to mechanical movements, and build that into a cell phone, which would be capable of an extremely high degree of voice compression. I’m not sure how practical that actually is, but it’s amusing to watch this robot try and figure out how to make it work.

Can’t you see this guy in a techno band?