Japan Launches Talking Humanoid Robot Into Space

An anonymous reader writes "Kirobo, a talking humanoid robot, has been launched into space and is headed to the International Space Station. From the article: 'Japan has launched the world's first talking humanoid robot "astronaut" toward the International Space Station. Kirobo — derived from the Japanese words for "hope" and "robot" — was among five tons of supplies and machinery on a rocket launched Sunday from Tanegashima in southwestern Japan, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said. The childlike robot was designed to be a companion for astronaut Koichi Wakata and will communicate with another robot on Earth, according to developers. Wakata is expected to arrive at the space station in November.'"

Re:no article?

[djupedal]

It's basically a toy - less than a foot high, I think - it responds to basic verbal pre-programmed commands. And since it only responds to Japanese and no one up there right now speaks enough to play with it, they will use someone on earth that has already worked with it to communicate over radio.

I'm going to call this more of a stunt than anything else, sorry.

Grammatically, yes, practically, no.

[tlambert]

Is Japanese easier to process for voice recognition than English?

Grammatically, yes, practically, no.

Japanese is more regular than English, and it is SOV order instead of SVO order. Subject -> Object -> Verb means you have your subject object, and the parameter object, before you're told to call the Subject object's member function.

Idiomatically, however, there's a huge amount of context use to imply subject and object, so if you were to try and parse spken Japanese, you might have a problem if you weren't there for the start of the conversation. I rather expect that it's limited to completely context free full sentences and/or simple commands, rather than understanding idiomatic usage.

Someone else mentioned homonyms; you can get a homonym of "you are a tall man" that could also mean "you have just crossed a bridge" and "you are a martian" (one of my favorite Japanese puns, actually, because of the story a friend tells which goes with it), but again, it requires idiomatic usage to get to that point, so practically, you can eliminate ambiguity intentionally, the same way that you can avoid puns in English, by further constraining how you are allowed to talk to the thing.

Or you could just flag ambiguous idiomatic usage, and have it ask for clarification, which is what most robot engineers would do.