CACM logo

This Article

ACM TechNews

ROILA, a New Spoken Language Designed for Robots

Popular Science

July 16, 2010

[article image]
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. Credit: ROILA

Eindhoven University of Technology researchers are developing the Robot Interaction Language (ROILA), a spoken language for robots that is meant to be easy for people to learn and easy for robots to understand. ROILA features simple, regular grammar and includes nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns.

ROILA uses an algorithm-generated vocabulary of about 850 words, which look like a combination of African languages, Dutch, and English. It has no irregularities, so word markers are used to indicate past and present tense.

The researchers say ROILA combines parts of the most successful natural and artificial languages. ROILA words are composed of phonemes that are shared among most human languages, and the word-creation algorithm makes the words sound as different from each other as possible.

From Popular Science
View Full Article

 

Abstracts Copyright © 2010 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA

Post a comment...
Name: Anonymous

Signed and anonymous comments submitted to this site are moderated and will appear if they are relevant to the topic and not abusive. Your comment will appear with your username if you are signed into the site, and will be anonymous if you are not signed in. View our policy on comments

Tools For Readers

Bookmark and Share
Default Font Size Large Font Size X-Large Font Size Text Size

Related ACM Resources

Conferences:

Courses:

  • Managing Devices, Disks and Data - In this course, you will update and manage device drivers, manage disks to store data efficiently, and manage data stored on network storage devices. (Duration: …
More About ACM Resources

About Communications | Join ACM External Link | Renew External Link | Subscribe External Link | Sign In | For Authors | For Advertisers External Link | Privacy | Site Map | Help | Contact Us | Mobile Site

Copyright © 2012 by the ACM. All rights reserved.

Back to Top