WHEN Hideyuki Sawada says he wants his robots to be articulate, he’s not talking computer-generated voice synthesis. Rather, he wants them to talk just like humans. So he’s designing an entire artificial voice system, complete with its own lung, windpipe, vocal cords and throat.
The idea is to make interacting with robots more natural. Unlike the stilted metallic utterances of a “Robbie the Robot” type droid, Sawada’s creations at Kagawa University in Japan will have a natural-sounding voice that produces sound in the same way as the human vocal tract.
To mimic a human lung, Sawada uses a compressed air…
