FREDERIC Kaplan of Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory has taught the
company’s robotic toy dog Aibo to recognise and say the names of objects.
Kaplan aims to let the robodog interact with people using words—and
eventually acquire well-developed language skills. But he wanted to do it
without interfering with the existing robot. “We haven’t touched it. We have
just built a cognitive layer that sits on top of its normal autonomous
behaviour,” he says. The additional program runs on a PC that is plugged into
the dog’s computer “brain”.
When confronted with a new object, such as a red ball,…
