Scientists Claim 'Virtual Head' Could Become Personal Assistant of Future

Scientists have claimed that a virtual talking head called Zoe expresses a range of human emotions and could one day be used as a personal assistant.

Scientists have claimed that a virtual "talking head" called Zoe expresses a range of human emotions and could one day be used as a personal assistant.

The disembodied head generates voice and facial expression from typed text but could be used as a digital personal assistant similar to Holly, the computer on the sci-fi comedy 'Red Dwarf,' Sky News reported.

Stroke Rehabilitation and Robots
A new study reveals that using robots to provide speech and physical therapies to stroke patients may provide noticeable benefits

The head is so lifelike that it is being used to teach children suffering from autism to recognise emotion and deaf children to lip-read.

Professor Roberto Cipolla, an engineer at Cambridge University, said that this technology could be the start of a whole new generation of interfaces which make interacting with a computer much more like talking to another human being.

The face is that of 'Hollyoaks' actress Zoe Lister, whose speech and facial expressions were recorded by researchers over several days, and then the face was super-imposed over a computer generated template.

Octarms for robots for better grasping of objects
In the field of robotics the latest is that of the development of an analog to our hand which resembles and works in a similar way as that of tentacles or an elephant trunk.

In the future, it will be possible for all the users to upload their own faces and voices to create a personal digital assistant on their smartphone.

Zoe's voice has six basic settings - happy, sad, tender, angry, afraid and neutral and users can adjust the settings to different levels, as well as changing the pitch, speed and depth of the voice itself.

Robots Learning Language With The Aid Of 'Artificial Brain'
A robot was able to learn, and subsequently understand, new sentences containing a new grammatical structure with the help of an artificial brain system.

Source-ANI

Humanoid Robots Might Soon Be Working Alongside Humans in Factories
The unveiling of a humanoid robot, designed to work safely alongside its human co-workers on factory production lines took place in the U.S recently.