Tiny toys have tiny speakers and they can create sounds from the simplest buzzing to natural sounding speech.
Ever since the first teddy bear or toy was able to say a few words children and adults have been amazed.
Even today most of these talking toys can’t really be called robots since they may have some sensors most don’t operate autonomously but can more properly be called some form of animatronics..
The talking Elmos and Furbys with their foot sensors that when touched will say cute things or giggle uncontrollably are simple toys that could be called animatronics.
We will shortly talk about some open source solutions to getting speech in almost any language automatically from the text that you input on the internet.
Speech recognition is one of the goals in the ai movement. To recognize words and faces and to be able to respond in a human like way to some of the most unpredictable questions.
You can see Anthony Robbins interviewing the Sophia robot on youtube. Anthony knows that some of his questions are being misunderstood but he is so gentle as he allows for the mistakes as you would while talking to a child. It is quite refreshing to see someone not destroy a moment when he so easily could pick it apart.
There are similar out on the street scenese with the Engineered Arts people where they have their Mesmer robots out in a cafe to watch the reaction from the people. At first people can see that there is something not quite right about the person sitting near them . Then it becomes totally obvious that we are not yet there but are getting close every week.
This is some newer amazing software which can read any text from a webpage in dozens of super realistic voices.
The applications of this technology for robotics could be very interesting.
Here is a company called Speechelo that adverstises alot on youtube and the software looks amazing
.https://speechelo.com
Many programs that you can find advertised on youtube have various product versions. Some have user restrictions and many operate off the cloud and you do not download all or any of the program.
Many programs have simple versions and more advanced ones of interest to the business user.