IBM’s Watson to teach robots social skills

IBM wants to teach robots to better understand and mimic human communication by using some of the artificial-intelligence techniques that emerged from its Watson project.

During a keynote speech at a conference called RoboBusiness held in San Jose, California, this week, Robert High, chief technology officer of Watson at IBM, demonstrated some of the techniques his team is working on using a small humanoid robot.

The robot, a Nao model from the company Aldebaran, spoke with realistic intonation and made appropriate hand gestures during a conversation with High. It even exhibited a little impatience and sarcasm, miming looking at its watch, for example, when asking High to hurry up with his talk.

Robot interaction is becoming an important issue as industrial robots start moving into new settings, requiring them to work alongside people, and as companies try to develop robots for use in stores, offices, and even the home. IBM used a range of artificial-intelligence techniques to develop Watson, which proved capable of winning the game show Jeopardy! after mining vast quantities of information and extracting meaning from the text.

Read more at Impact Lab

Image Credit: Wikipedia

-jk-