Posted 07.14.2010 at 1:14 pm
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Pito loki wikute tuji!
That's ROILA for "I like fruit." These Lego Mindstorms NXT robots are learning ROILA, Robot Interaction Language, as part of a team of robots donated by Lego. The next step is to allow the NXT robots to talk in ROILA via text-to-speech synthesis.
ROILA
Soon, when you want your helper robot to wash the dishes or fetch you a cold one, you may have to say it in a different way. Like "butij pimo lupuma." (Get that bottle.)
Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are working on a spoken language for robots, built with both human brains and robot simplicity in mind. ROILA, or Robot Interaction Language, is intended to be easy for people to learn and easy for robots to understand.
It has simple, regular grammar and includes nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and four pronouns (I, you, he and she). It includes an algorithm-generated vocabulary of about 850 basic words, which look like a mishmash of African languages, Dutch and English.
The project's leaders say the proliferation of helper robots will require a more efficient means of communication. The easiest thing would be to talk to robots, but current speech recognition technology is not advanced enough for the robots to understand us very well.
With that in mind, computer scientists started from scratch and invented a new language for robots and people to learn together. This is not a new concept -- as the ROILA team points out, Palm Inc. invented Graffiti, a new alphabet for its handheld devices.
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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, artificial languages, future of robots, language, languages, natural language software, robots, roila, speech, speech tech, word vocabularyROILA combines elements of the most successful natural and artificial languages. The words are composed of phonemes that are shared among most human languages, and a word-creation algorithm ensures the words sound as different from each other as possible.
And they do sound different: "Pito leto fosit webufo buno besati" means "I can go left or right." The ROILA Web site will eventually include audio recordings of each word.
The grammar has no irregularities, so word markers are used to indicate past and present tense. For instance, "I walked to the house" translates to "Pito fosit jifi bubas," which literally means "I walk (marker past tense) house."
Literacy is a key element of freedom, so for those wondering whether a robot language would allow our helpers to revolt, it's worth pointing out that ROILA vocabulary includes bellicose terms like attack (kisate), army (kalutu), destruction (tofomu) and gun (fekopu).
But don't worry -- there's also a word for harmony (wobiju) and yes, even love (loki).
[via Make:Online]
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I wonder if they took some of their ideas from Lojban which is a constructed language also meant to be able to communicate with computers
So...they elaborated on the furbby language?
This way when they decide to rise up against the humans, we won't have any idea what they are conspiring towards.
I'm with bigburb on this one, we'd be oblivious!
Otherwise a neat idea though
Mi estas certa ke ĉi tio laboros.
Instead of making a new algorithm for the robot to understand the English language or possibly figuring out how to speak English with no irregularities for the robot to understand us better, they came up with an algorithm taking Germanic and African languages to make up a new language that works similar to Japanese? Why not just use Japanese then which is spoken in a non-past tense fashion? There are only about two or three irregular verbs in its entire context. Seems like a waste of research to me. Scientist milking to grant tree it seems. I have to give it to them for squeezing in a deviant Norse god's name for love though. Clever girl...
::ahem:: the grant tree*
And I thought Loki was the god of mischief, that goes to tell you you can never trust a robot...
And I thought Loki was the god of mischief, that goes to tell you you can never trust a robot...
And I thought Loki was the god of mischief, that goes to tell you you can never trust a robot...
Sorry, Message glitch... which goes to tell you you can never trust a computer...
First Klingon, then Na'vi, now this?!
How many fake languages does a nerd need to learn in one lifetime?
You forgot Esperanto.
....klaatu barada nikto
This doesn't make sense, if you can teach the robot, "robot" language you can teach it any language. In a few milliseconds.
Of all the dialects in the world it would seem that trusting the development of a new language, especially one that has the potential for becoming the standard for future communication, should not be left to the dutch. Same for Iceland.
Gort! Klaatu barada nikto
@fummfur:
Japanese would be as confusing as english, as it is just as high-context. Granted, it has fewer irregularities, but it makes up it's complexity in the written forms, and it DOES have a past tense. Example: Tabeta (meaning I ate) from the verb tabe, which means to eat. I honestly think that it will be a long time before we can give any machine the mental complexity and capacity to understand the subtleties of language. In the meantime, it might make sense for us to simply say what we mean, in simple terms. Not sure if there's a language we need to make for that. :P
Can I get a translation please? I...um...am working on German and Russian right now not Esperanto. All I got was something about a barrier...I think.
Check out this article on the future of intelligent robots:
www.associatedcontent.com/article/5790196/future_of_robotics_mapping_the_human.html?cat=58