[Tyler]

Robotic Mouth Sounds Off
26 July 2011, 4:48 pm

          Computer speech these days are mostly computer simulated or a series of prerecorded wave files.  Researchers in Kagawa University in Japan however designed a robotic mouth to make sounds similar to the way humans do.  Air is forced through tubes in its throat and sound is produced in a synthetic mouth, tongue and nasal cavity.  A microphone listens to human speech and the robotic mouth tries to reproduce the same sounds on its own.  The mouth goes through trial and error listening to its own output and revising the shape of the throat and mouth until it approximates the sound it is trying to reproduce. The video is a little creepy but shows a human looking rubber mouth and nose going through various shapes to reproduce sound and speech.

Source: robots.net

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[Freddy]

One of the most bizzare things I have seen, but oddly just the other day I was wondering if anyone had done something like this...it was because I was playing with mouth shapes in a 3D model.  Strange now to see that someone is actually doing this in real life and not my imagination.

[Bragi]

cool he. Which I also had such hardware...

[white]

I got to admire the guy though. Keeping yourself motivated for more than 10 years working on a product like that must be hard. I would have given up after a few months or thrown it out the window after realizing how annoying the sound coming out of it was.

[Art]

I don't know...the speech sounds so...Mechanical!

OK...OK...it really IS a very cool experiment and could very
well help pave the way toward assistive technologies (vocally
impaired, cancer, prosthetics, accidents, etc.) Good stuff!!