Natural Language Processing

Designing Jibo’s automatic speech recognition, with Roberto Pieraccini

Jibo 14 Oct 2015

Finding the right approach to automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a critical step in Jibo’s design: get it right and the experience will be great; get it wrong, and it could really take awa...

Why are JIBO, Pepper, Siri, Google Now and Cortana so important?

Frank Tobe 16 Mar 2015

There's a race going on to see which AI solution providing personal assistance is welcomed by businesses, end users and consumers, and whether this will be physical or virtual....

Natural language: The de-facto interface convention for social robotics

Mark Stephen Meadows 21 Jan 2015

Social Robotics: The UX of Natural Language A very smart and snotty journalist told me that he had spoken with Aldebaran's Pepper system when he was in Boston. Much to his chagrin, the robot didn't ...

Inroads in perception

Frank Tobe 22 Aug 2014

Google's recent acquisition of Emu Messenger is just one of many items in recent news about improvements in perception and artificial intelligence (AI)....

The next era of conversational technology

Roberto Pieraccini and Jibo 04 Jul 2014

In 1922, the Elmwood Button Co. commercialized a toy that could respond to voice commands. The toy, called Radio Rex, was a dog made of celluloid that would leap out of its house when you called its n...

Two ears, one mouth (or, Somatic analytics, and a talk with Dr. Skip Rizzo)

Mark Stephen Meadows 20 Nov 2013

This article returns to the thread of the last few months by looking at how robots can measure our emotions and body language. My aunt, a Tennessee tobacco grower, used to remind me that God gave m...

In-corporating body language into NLP (or, More notes on the design of automated body language)

Mark Stephen Meadows 07 Aug 2013

This article discusses how body language is a part of natural language, personality, and NLP design. The article covers various methods for approaching this problem and makes recommendations for the r...

Talking robot sent into space

Frank Tobe 04 Aug 2013

Kirobo, a 13” humanoid robot, was launched today and is on its way to the International Space Station. A mashup of the Japanese word for hope, “Kibo”, and “robot”, Kirobo is designed to b...

My robot is smelling my dirty laundry (or, Notes on privacy, PRISM, and home service robotics)

Mark Stephen Meadows 03 Jul 2013

This article considers privacy in robotic systems (such as personal service robotics) as being of greater importance than privacy in telecommunications (such as Internet). We will return to our regula...

“A Paro walks into a club…” (or, Notes on the design of automated body language)

Mark Stephen Meadows 05 Jun 2013

This article discusses personality design and how proper natural language interface design includes body language. The article is about the design of hearts and minds for robots. It argues that psyc...

The uncanny valet (or, Notes on the design of robot psychology)

Mark Stephen Meadows 04 May 2013

This article outlines the problems of today's phone and online help systems and offers solutions to conversational systems of tomorrow. The article is about the design of hearts and minds for robots, ...

AFK (or, Robotic free speech, and what you can do to help)

Mark Stephen Meadows 03 Apr 2013

This article looks at how the robotics industry of today is following in the footsteps of the personal computer industry of yesterday, and why Natural Language Processing, like the Graphical User Inte...

The death of search (or, My dysfunctional relationship with Siri)

Mark Stephen Meadows 06 Mar 2013

This article looks at the arrival of systems such as Siri, Google Now, and Watson and claims that these systems are the search engines of the next decade because they mine intimate data. Since they ...