Industrial Robotics with speech
Norberto Pires, from the Mechanical Engineering department at University of Coimbra in Portugal, has been working on an industrial robot that can be controlled through voice. He's doing everything in SAPI, with the Microsoft Mary voice, so it sounds just like a robot. I wonder if the new Windows Vista voices will improve the experience, when it no longer sounds like a robot.
Meanwhile he's faced with problems at the limits of what SR can do today: dealing well in noisy, industrial situations. But he's going about it the right way, figuring out how to constrain the set of possible responses in ways that reduce the effects of noise.
Check out his video:
